For the cast, melding into Minnesota culture not only meant downing such culinary oddities as lutefisk and lefse, but learning to use nasally vowels and dropping all their g's. As in the real Midwest, each of the characters in Drop Dead Gorgeous has an individual accent, some more pronounced than others. Kirsten Dunst explains the general rules: "You have to round your O's and you have to use this really relaxed way of speaking. You can't worry too much about pronouncing things clearly or anything like that. Just let it flow."

The only person who escapes an accent is Denise Richard's character - the perfectly molded Becky Leeman, whose mother encouraged her to speak in "broadcast English." "I was really bummed about not getting to do the dialect, which I thought would be a blast," says Richards. "But as Gladys Leeman says: 'we want our daughter to sound like she's from nowhere. That would be better.' Her upbringing has assassinated any trace of an accent."

For the rest of the cast, hanging around Minnesota natives gave them plenty of exposure to Scandinavian-bred phrases like "yah" and intense conversations about the weather. Cast and crew found themselves hitting a cultural study bonanza when the Minnesota State Fair came to St. Paul while they were shooting, introducing them to such local delights as a thousand-pound pig and a butter-carving contest. The cast and crew also witnesses a woman crowned "Princess Kay of the Milky Way" who was placed in a refrigerated chamber in order to have her face carved into a giant butter sculpture.