In partnership with Searchlight Pictures
Any acting gig requires work, but when the job description includes “must sing like legendary pop star” you’re gonna need to prep properly. Enter Eric Vetro, the most sought-after music teacher in Hollywood. He’s helped everyone, from Ariana Grande to Austin Butler, learn to play iconic artists on the big screen. Via Zoom from Los Angeles (where else?), he takes us inside the process…
Changing Ariana Grande’s voice for Wicked
Eric Vetro: “Ariana always had an incredibly wide vocal range, but we worked for months on getting her voice to sound more operatic. She wanted to have more of a Broadway – legit soprano, as they call it – voice. That’s what her character, Glinda, should be. People think she’s one of those people who just wakes up and does everything perfectly but she doesn’t. She really works hard to earn it.”
Getting Riley Keough over her fear of the family biz
“I worked with Riley on Daisy Jones And The Six. She’d never sung before. That’s right, Elvis’ granddaughter had never sung before. Her mother, Lisa-Marie, was a singer too – and married to Michael Jackson briefly. So she was surrounded by music. I think she was intimidated by all of them and their success – and so when she started out she was very shy about singing but quickly overcame it.”
Giving Austin Butler an Elvis-adjacent intro
“Austin was going through the audition process for Elvis as I was working with Riley. She offered to ask Priscilla, her grandmother, to talk to him. That never came to be during the audition process but Austin read Priscilla’s book, Elvis & Me. She wrote that Elvis was at his most vulnerable when he couldn’t sleep in the middle of the night and would go to the piano and sing. So Austin filmed himself in a bathrobe, at night, at the piano.“
Euro-tripping with Will Ferrell
“I already knew him as a singer because I worked with him many years ago on Step Brothers. If you remember, he sings ‘Time To Say Goodbye’ by Andrea Bocelli. Then I worked with him again on the Netflix movie Eurovision Song Contest: The Story Of Fire Saga, music by Savan Kotecha. That movie soundtrack did extremely well. It was on the US charts for weeks. They wanted him to perform at the Academy Awards but it didn’t work out.”
Taking the plunge with Halle Bailey
“Halle was very open to suggestions when we worked on The Little Mermaid – and some of those suggestions came to me via the director, Rob Marshall. He wanted me to help bring her acting skills into the songs more, so that when she sang ‘Part Of Your World’ the audience would really believe that she was spontaneously singing about what she was looking at – and not [reciting pre-prepared lyrics].”
Getting Timothée Chalamet to sound like Dylan
“A Complete Unknown focuses on Bob’s early years, so part of the challenge was that his voice changed from year to year. They were very subtle but Timothée really wanted to capture those changes so that if you knew Bob or had listened to recordings, you would notice what he was doing. We spent long sessions just listening to Dylan’s music and discussing what was happening to his voice.”
‘A Complete Unknown’ is out January 17 in UK cinemas
Eric Vetro’s BBC Maestro course ‘Sing Like the Stars’ is available here.