How did Australian actor Ashleigh Cummings nail the Kensington accent in ‘Long Bright River’?

Actor Ashleigh Cummings was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to Australian parents and moved to Sydney when she was 12. There, she studied ballet, attended film school, acted in several films, and even earned a best young actor nomination at the 2010 Australian Film Institute Awards.

But there’s no way we’d know any of that watching her play Kacey in Long Bright River, the Peacock limited series based on Liz Moore’s Kensington-set novel of the same name. The younger sister of police officer Mickey (Amanda Seyfried), Kacey lives on the streets of Kensington and struggles with addiction.

In the show, when Cummings says, “It’s goin’ be easier to pop off the bottom of the block,” she flattens and rounds vowels in a way that’s distinctly Philly. The O in goin’ stays rounded at first, then becomes flatter with paap, then rounds up again with oaf, and then is squished flat in baatum and blaak.

“Was that Kensington? Did I do the right version?” Cummings asked her friend-turned-accent-coach Justin Crawford in a recent Zoom interview with The Inquirer.

“Yeah,” said Crawford.

The two “met on the Ave” through a mutual friend during one of Cummings’ many research trips to the neighborhood. Crawford, who was already consulting on the production, became her go-to guide when she needed help with her Philadelphia accent.

“I was trying to explain to her what the Philly accent is like,” said Crawford. “It’s like how do you get your point across the most quick and efficient way possible. So I actually call it lazy speech. Just get rid of all the consonants, any articulation, all the pronunciation. Just get rid of it all.”

But it wasn’t just the Philly accent that Crawford wanted Cummings to master. She had to pick up the specific dialect and vernacular of Kensington, where the series is set.

“Each part of Philadelphia has its own unique sound,” he said. “So like Frankford and Kensington sound one way, Southwest Philly sounds another way, South Philly sounds a different way. So it all just depends on where you’re trying to sound like you’re coming from. Like in the Northeast, you would be maybe a little quicker than how they would say it down in Southwest, or the Bottom, as we call it.”

The Kensington dialect, he said, influences from Irish, Polish, and Italian communities that had settled there. “So you kind of get this melting pot of a dialect, and it just all transforms itself into Philly,” said Crawford, who grew up in Frankford and, like Kacey, spent years struggling with substance abuse.

“Nobody calls it’s the Kensington Avenue. It’s just the Ave,” he said. “The Roosevelt Boulevard? Nobody ever calls it that. It’s just the Bully. You say, ‘Yeah, I just got to take the Bully out to the City Line, and I’m good.‘”

The partnership with Crawford was all the more special, Cummings said, because of his shared history with Kacey. “It was deeply emotional,” she said. “[He] taught me about the emotional aspect of all the dialogue and the experiences Kacey was going through.”

Although the series was filmed in New York, the production took great pains to try for a Philly authenticity. “I object to lazy shorthand about Philadelphia, and I’m only interested in sort of more complex, well-rounded representations of the city,” Moore said to The Inquirer earlier this month.

That’s why, she said, nobody says jawn in the show. It’s only fair, Crawford said, “because we don’t use it as much as people think. It’s very specific when we bring that word out, we use it when we’ve forgotten the word, of what a thing actually is. So then jawn becomes the filler.”

While jawn wasn’t on Cummings’ list of Philly words to master, bol was. “Like the ol’ bol, the young bol, the dude, the boy,” Crawford said. And there was “oodles of noodles,” Cummings said.

“You don’t say it like that,” said Crawford. “Oodleso’noodles. It’s one word. It’s not instant noodles, it’s not ramen, it’s oodleso’noodles.”

And you make it with wooder? “Yes,” Crawford said, “W-O-O-D-E-R.”

While at it, he also settled the hoagie vs. sandwich debate. “When you make a sandwich, you make it at home,” he said. “You don’t go get a sandwich outside.”

Other Philly-isms on Cummings’ list: out of pocket and jeet?

“If somebody says they’re from down the way, you know they’re from the neighborhood. Somebody says they’re taking the El, you know they’re from Philly because everybody else calls it the train, or they call it a whole bunch of other names like the metro,” said Crawford.

“Sometimes it was a fine balance of doing the accent and being able to be understood,” Cummings said with a laugh.

And things did go beyond general comprehension sometimes. “When you go to buy substances, you say score; like ‘Where do you go to score?‘” Cummings said. But in Kensington, Crawford told her, you say cop. “Justin was like, ‘No one would say score in Kensington.” The producers, however, kept score in. “They were like, ‘Unfortunately, the only people who are going to understand what you’re saying will be people in Kensington, the rest of the world is going to be like, ‘What did you say?‘”

“It’s so easy to fall in love with Philly,” said Cummings, who hasn’t eaten from a Wawa but did order a drink. “With sprinkles” she added. “We call them Hundreds of Thousands in Australia. I was translating things three times over.”

Cummings, Crawford thinks, did a fantastic job with the accent. After watching the series, he texted her. “I was like, ‘You sound incredible. Like, you could be my neighbor down the block.‘”

”I fell in love with it so quickly, and I fell in love with speaking it,” Cummings said of the Kensington accent. “I feel like a braver person with the accent. Sometimes I miss the show, or I miss Philly, or I miss Justin and my friends on the Ave, and I play the recordings. It’s kind of creepy,” she added with a laugh.

“Long Bright River” is streaming on Peacock.