It’s always a little startling to hear Tony Shalhoub talk in his regular voice. After all, he spends so much time onstage and on-screen trying on other peoples’ accents.
The Emmy winner has played Germans, Greeks, Hispanics and Russians and even a space alien in the “Men in Black” films.
On Broadway in “Act One,” he actually played three characters – one with a Cockney accent, one with just a hint of a British accent and one who was an urbane Northeasterner.
He’s often gravitated toward Italian parts, playing immigrants from that country in the film “Big Night” and “Golden Boy” onstage and a Fiat 500 in “Cars.” And for eight seasons, he adopted a weird Maine-Italian dialect on “Wings” that even he’s not sure about. “Let’s just say it was a bit of a hybrid,” he says.
So it’s no wonder that Shalhoub re-emerges on Broadway on Thursday in “The Band’s Visit ” with a military uniform, a moustache – and a luxurious Egyptian accent. How his character sounds is one of the first things he works on.
“It’s something that, for me, really helps to find the inner life of the character, the more I work on that sound,” he says. “And it helps me get to the core of the person.”