We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Paula Vanlandingham a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Paula, thanks for joining us today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

After I finished my Master’s Degree in Linguistic Anthropology in 1998, I was thrilled to work as a research analyst (a career I enjoyed for a decade until the Great Recession hit in 2008 and gutted the company I worked for). Like millions of other workers, I was faced with a drastic career change in order to continue to provide for my family in the midst of a terrible economic disaster. I took a low-level administrative support job at a local university to make ends meet.

By 2009, I had connected with the university theatre department and began volunteering as a dialect coach for productions that required accents for the performance, putting my linguistic knowledge to work in a creative way while I worked outside my original career choice. Eventually I entered the PhD program there and taught dialects as a graduate student in the Theatre Department for student actors. I began to explore ways to offer this expertise to professional actors as well, and as the technology progressed in virtual communication platforms like Facetime, Skype, and eventually Zoom, I branched out and began to develop a new side career in this area (which I loved).

5 years later, I had established enough of a client base to leave the university and focus more on my growing new career. Online social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook connected me with actors in film, television and videogames all over the country and eventually in multiple cities in the world. I did continue to teach foreign language as a substitute teacher in my local school district because my linguistic knowledge across multiple languages put me in high demand.

But by January 2020, immediately before the Covid pandemic hit, I made the decision to dedicate my time 100% to dialect coaching only. That lucky decision insulated me from the financial devastation of the pandemic because I was able to work with actors from LA to New York and around the world, all from the safety of my home studio.

Each major change that pushed me to dedicate myself more fully to my creative career at each step (Recession, Virtual Technology, the pandemic) seemed to result in a better and bigger outcome overall. My takeaway from those experiences is that my skill, expertise and passion had been there all along for this work that I loved, but I had always felt that “safer” career work was more reliable. Ultimately, my business blossomed only when I put my efforts fully into it and stopped splitting my abilities and time. And many workers who trusted their “safe” careers found themselves laid off with zero security, supposedly the thing I’d been afraid of the whole time.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

As a young person, I loved acting. In elementary school, I discovered I had a gift for mimicry, accents, and foreign language, so when an opportunity to try out for “A Christmas Carol” at school, I was cast right away because I could do the necessary Cockney accent! I continued my love of theatre all the way through high school and into college and beyond. I studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York. My passion always revolved around dialects and language, and eventually I wanted to pursue linguistics more formally in an academic setting. The combination of a life in acting and a love of language really made me the ideal dialect coach for teaching other actors.

As the pandemic forced actors in the industry to audition by means of “self-tapes” submitted electronically rather than in-person traditional auditions, the timeline for actors shrank to days or hours to prepare their material. I had developed a unique teaching method that reduced anxiety and made complex linguistic concepts accessible to a lay person in a very short amount of time. I had already honed the techniques to be effective in the virtual environment, so this allowed me to connect to any actor, anywhere in the world, and help them master an accent with lightning speed. Moreover, these actors were able to book paid work, and that gave me the greatest satisfaction that what I was doing was allowing other people to be successful in their own careers that they loved.

I even developed a specialty of being able to teach actors how to perform in languages they themselves did not speak! I’ve coached actors to act in Hebrew, Spanish, German, Russian, and even ASL. My all-time favorite so far was the opportunity to teach an American actor to perform a role in an epic Spanish-language Mexican Western, in which he had to play an Irish priest in the 1800s who spoke Spanish with an Irish accent! And to top it off, the actor never studied Spanish; I had to teach him the language phonetically and with an accent. My work lets me pull off miracles!

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I love the fact that by making a complex thing very accessible, I’m able to create joy in my clients, when they achieve a surprise sense of accomplishment. On top of that, I help them accomplish goals in the work that they love, and to provide for themselves and their families. That’s a terrific sense of accomplishment for me.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I’ve been so thrilled to reach fantastic goals like coaching actors on every major network and streaming service; one of the films I coached has even won an Oscar! The videogame franchises I’ve been a part of have grossed over $1 billion. I’ve helped with everything from Star Wars to Call of Duty to Indiana Jones; my clients trust me with their careers and livelihoods, and I consider that a huge honor. I have no doubt that my professional opportunities will continue to bring me into ever more spectacular projects. For me, the goal is longevity. I love being able to provide a good life for my family (and my dogs!), and my goal is to be so good at what I do that I remain the “go-to” dialect coach for actors both at the beginning of their careers and at the height of their success. That’s what gives me a sustaining sense of pride and creates a wonderful quality of life for me. From this vantage point, all the risks were absolutely worth it.

Contact Info:

• Website: AccentPaula.com
• Instagram: @AccentColors
• Other: TikTok @fleur_de_linguist (107,000 followers!!)