Andrea James

Finding Her Voice

backstage

Felicity Huffman wraps up a stellar year conquering film and television.
December 28, 2005

To achieve Bree’s deeper, more masculine voice, Huffman studied with coach Andrea James, who works with many transgender women. “I still couldn’t get it,” Huffman says of the process. “I went through various voices-high, really low-and nothing was clicking. Then I met a woman named Katie Boll in New York, who’s a voice teacher. We kind of paralleled what I did with the acting part, which was, first I had to find the internal journey, and then I could find the externals. With my voice, we had to find a place that felt self-conscious and oppressed with a lot of self-loathing, and then figure out how to literally drop it. She figured out how to drop it about six octaves and what the warm-up was. I had to do that every morning.”

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