A voice coaching session with James Bond star Sir Sean Connery was “one of the more surreal episodes in my life”, Nicola Sturgeon has said.
She initially thought the famous Scottish actor might be joking when he tried to teach her how to deepen her voice.
Recalling how he got her to talk with a bit of paper between her teeth, she said this had “got to count as one of the more surreal episodes in my life”.
It was in 2004, when the SNP were still in opposition at Holyrood, that Connery had asked if she would meet him, Ms Sturgeon said.
She spoke about her meeting with the film star to the BBC Newscast podcast as her memoir, Frankly, was published.
Ms Sturgeon recalled: “Sean had been in Edinburgh and asked if I would go see him and I went along to New Club, which is one of these old private members’ clubs in Edinburgh, and had this one-to-one session with Sean, where he said he thought I could do with deepening my voice in interviews, and he was going to teach me how to do it.”
She continued: “Basically, it consisted of me with a rolled up bit of paper between my teeth where he gave me things to say, and he said this was how he had learned to deepen his voice in acting.
“And it worked while I was doing it. At first I was like ‘is he taking the piss’.
“But then it started to work.”
However, she said that while the method “I guess does work when you are filming scenes as an actor”, she said she “would have looked a bit odd” if she was “sitting in a television interview with my teeth clamped together”.
Connery, a high-profile supporter of Scottish independence, died in October 2020 at the age of 90.
