Julianne Moore says mimicking Sarah Palin's accent in “Game Change” almost killed her

"I took all the music off my phone and just listened to her voice constantly.”

Julianne Moore is recalling just how difficult it was to pick up Sarah Palin’s vernacular for the HBO film, Game Change.

While visiting Watch What Happens Live on Monday, the actress was asked whether it was more challenging to speak with a lisp in her new film May December or mimic the former governor of Alaska’s regional accent in the 2012 political drama.

“The thing that was really, really hard was Sarah Palin’s voice. That almost killed me,” Moore answered. “I listened to nothing else for months on end. I took all the music off my phone and just listened to her voice constantly.”

Based on the 2008 presidential election, Game Change saw Moore star as Palin alongside Ed Harris, who played her campaign running mate John McCain. The 2012 political drama also starred Woody Harrelson, Sarah Paulson, Ron Livingston, and more.

Moore, who was joined on Andy Cohen’s talk show by her May December costar Natalie Portman, also explained the reason why she intentionally chose to have her character speak with a lisp in the film.

“There was something about the character who presents as very childlike and I thought it’d be interesting to have this speech issue,” she said. “And I also wanted to have something that Natalie could copy because you were in something where she has to kind of gradually assume my mannerisms and my voice and so that seemed to be something that would work.”

Moore previously spoke with EW about how her character purposefully chooses to portray herself as naive and innocent throughout the topsy-turvy film — even if that may not have been the actual case.

“It's really about the storytelling: What story is she telling in the world about who she thinks she is?” She said. “She says, ‘I am naive. I always have been.’ It's a willful denial. The distance between what actually happened, which is that she transgressed greatly, and the narrative that she's projecting to the world is vast. In this vastness, there's this huge amount of emotional volatility.”

Listen to Moore discuss tackling Palin’s prose in the clip above.

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Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.