Stephen Fry's Simple Trick to Perfecting Accent in 'Treasure'

Stephen Fry has shared how he perfected his Polish accent for the Holocaust comedy-drama Treasure, with the trick driving his husband Elliott Spencer "crazy."

The British actor usually portrays staunchly English characters, but spent hours attempting to master a Polish accent for the film, which hits U.S. theaters on Friday (June 14).

"The most important [thing] is for the music [of it] to be right," Fry told Newsweek. "The rise and fall. The rhythm."

The 66-year-old stars as Holocaust survivor Edek in Treasure. Based on the 1999 novel by Too Many Men by Lily Brett, the film follows Edek and his music-journalist daughter Ruth (played by Lena Dunham) as they journey around his homeland.

To get the accent right, Fry watched interviews with Polish performers who have since moved to America.

"You know, there's a great pianist called Emanuel Ax—which is a wonderful name—who has exactly that history, so I kind of listened to him in terms of the Polish [accent]," the Critics Choice Award winner said.

However, he also confessed to watching Polish dramas on Netflix as research, much to the annoyance of Spencer, whom he wed in 2015.

"You'd be amazed how many Polish dramas there are on Netflix, if you go and look," Fry said.

"I always had them on and it would drive my husband crazy because we could just be hearing these Polish thrillers and murder stories and romances all the time."

Fry also underwent training with a Polish voice coach while filming a guest spot on The Morning Show in Los Angeles.

"[It was with] this marvelous coach that the production linked me up with a woman called Magda in Warsaw," he said.

"She took me through the very basics of the language and built it up and built it up, because I explained to her that I didn't want cards to learn that were just phonetic. I really felt that it would be much better if I understood."

Although Fry has a love of languages, he said Treasure is the first time that he had attempted to learn a Slavic one, describing the experience as "a big adventure."

"This was new to me. [It's] very different to a Germanic or a romance language like French, Italian or Spanish," Fry said.

"You know, some actors enjoy choreography as extra lessons, or fight directions or, you know, working with swords and things.

"I would hate that; I would feel I was back at school doing [gym]. I would just absolutely loathe it, but I don't mind doing extra language lessons."

However, the character of Edek had been living in the U.S. for decades in the film, which is set in 1991. Therefore, Fry was less concerned about technical aspects of the language, instead focusing on the rhythm to make his accent sound more authentic.

"People can lose the accent, as you know," the Sandman star said. "My Polish assistant on the film told me that this Polish actor had been in Australia for 20 years.

"His Polish accent had rather disappeared, and he sounded foreign. So I felt that it was OK if the accent wasn't perfect."

In Treasure, Edek and Ruth—who was born and raised in America—struggle to connect while exploring Edek's homeland.

The pair butt heads on a number of issues, with Ruth finding it hard to understand her father's reluctance to revisit the trauma. Conversely, Edek finds it hard to understand his daughter's desire to know more about her Jewish heritage.

"She thinks he's just being stubborn and old fashioned, and 'Why can't he understand why she wants to look around Poland?'" Fry said.

"And he's thinking, 'Why can't she understand that this is a place of pain for me?' I may appear to be very jolly, but every step we take is a reminder of some suffering that happened to me, or to friends, or to my family."

Although the film is comical, Fry—whose mother is Jewish—makes it clear that Treasure is in no way "laughing at the Holocaust or anything of that nature."

"There's a lot of comedy in real life and what people have to understand, and most people do, is that laughter is not the same as mockery or misunderstanding or underestimating," he said.

"If you seriously engage with human life, then you must occasionally laugh," Fry added.