He has worked with some of the world’s biggest stars.
He’s the man who helped Hollywood superstars like Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett perfect their Irish accents for demanding fim roles.
And he is the man who came up with an entirely new language for the hit fantasy series Game of Thrones, which stars Huddersfield actress Lena Headey.
Brendan Gunn is the man in the background and he shared his secrets on a visit to Huddersfield.
Dr Gunn is responsible for the dialogue strategies in major movies and TV shows and that stems from his background as an academic linguist.
Hear the Dothraki language in this Game of Thrones clip
He is an enthusiastic reader of Babel, the language magazine first published in 2012 and co-edited by Professors Lesley Jeffries and Dan McIntyre at the University of Huddersfield.
They invited him to give the inaugural Babel Lecture – marking the publication’s tenth issue – and Dr Gunn made frequent reference to key articles in the magazine, which has attracted contributions from many leading experts.
He went on to describe his work in film and TV.
“My job is to get printed text into the mouths of actors and it has many facets, in addition to dialect coaching.
“For example, when Cate Blanchett appeared as the crusading journalist Veronica Guerin, not only did the Australian actress have to master the Irish accent but also raise her voice to a much higher pitch. I needed to conduct voice exercises so that no damage was done”.
He did similar work with Pitt in the thriller Snatch. “Initially, he was told to do just a little touch of Irish. But then the actor saw a film about bare knuckle boxers in Ireland and decided to adopt their extreme speech patterns, aided by me as I was on set when director Guy Ritchie first heard this impenetrable accent.
“At first he was taken aback – and then he just went with it”, said Dr Gunn.
He described his work with actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis, who – as a method actor – continues to speak in his adopted dialect even when the cameras stop rolling.
There were several projects with the versatile American actor Edward Norton – such as the refined RP , or “received pronunciation”, that he deployed in “The Painted Veil”.
Working on the first series of TV’s “Game of Thrones”, Dr Gunn – realising that its fantasy world was derived from English history - used a Sheffield accent for the northerners and RP for the southern tribes. He also helped develop Dothraki , the invented language spoken by some of the characters.
