"Wooder, houmes, and hoe-gies - those sticky pronunciations of water, homes, and a totally rad sandwich became a national earworm when Brad Ingelsby's 2021 HBO series Mare of Easttown broke out, featuring Kate Winslet knocking back Rolling Rocks and delivering the Delco, Pennsylvania, sound so indelibly it inspired the Saturday Night Live sketch " Murder Durdur." The bit hit in part because the show was so popular (and sure, there's some class-gazing involved) but also for the fact that it's a very real way of speaking."
"Guiding those accents is Susanne Sulby, a dialect coach whose résumé includes Silver Linings Playbook (more Philly than Delco), the New York-set 21 Bridges, and now both of Ingelsby's HBO projects. Sulby, who is also an actress, approaches the job not just as a matter of phonetic translation but as an expression of mechanical physicality. You can hear this in the near-surgical manner that she describes the process. "I'm listening to how they open their mouths," Sulby says. "I might work with an actor and say, 'Feel the space in your mouth between your tongue and the roof, don't let that open up too wide.'""
Task revives the Delco, Pennsylvania accent popularized by Mare of Easttown and positions regional speech as a defining element of the series. The plot centers on an emotionally haunted FBI agent (Mark Ruffalo) and a revenge-driven thief (Tom Pelphrey) whose paths collide amid biker-gang–run drug dens. Both leads deliver powerful performances while the accent permeates the cast and setting. Dialect coach Susanne Sulby, a Pennsylvania native, shapes the speech through precise physical techniques that control mouth space and articulation. Sulby's approach treats dialect as mechanical physicality rather than mere phonetic imitation, producing authentic regional voices.
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