A WHOLE NEW ROLE
How man fell into voice acting
Sean Gurnsey’s resume was a mixed bag.
He has worked at a sawmill, at a Christian school, in information technology, at Home Hardware. His skills ranged from fixing toilets to reciting speeches.
A lot of this experience, he used as program director of Joe’s Place in Moose Jaw, the same youth centre he’d attended as a kid.
“Voice actor” was a new one for his CV.
A year ago, it became his latest work experience, even though he didn’t know if he’d live to see it through.
Gurnsey’s life changed after a tick bite during an Oklahoma paintball tournament in June 2012.
“In Saskatchewan, you’ve got ticks, it’s just like part of life, so I just tossed them, had a shower and didn’t think twice about it until about two months later,” Gurnsey said in a phone interview from Whitecourt, Alta., where he moved in February.
That’s when exhaustion kicked in, a strange fatigue he couldn’t explain. After a couple more weeks, he acquired stroke-like symptoms — “the left side of my body wasn’t working.”
He saw doctors, had MRI and stress tests, “and they all came up empty.”
A friend suggested being checked for Lyme disease, but “at that point the tests came back negative.”
Gurnsey went undiagnosed until 2016, living with the disease’s widespread and unpredictable symptoms.
They worsened to the point where he stepped down from his job at Joe’s Place last January.
“My resume had been stripped from me,” said Gurnsey, due to extreme pain, fatigue and weakness.
“I started looking at the service industry and I’m like no, I couldn’t do any of those. A Walmart greeter? And I was like no, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t even just sit and say hello to people. And I thought, ‘Oh man, this is bad news for me.’ ”
He stumbled upon voice acting at the suggestion of Jess Wiberg, a voice actor and former co-worker at Joe’s Place.
“(He) said, ‘You can do this on good days, and your bad days you just rest,’ ” Gurnsey recalled.
“I thought, ‘If nothing else, it’ll at least give me something to do.’ ”
He started his new career in a “ramshackle blanket fort” home recording studio, with “every blanket in the house” installed to deaden the sound.
“My kids thankfully were not cold at night, but we literally made a blanket fort and actually it had great sound quality,” said Gurnsey, who has four children with his wife, Cheryle.
He built a demo and a profile at Voices.com. He started doing some auditions and got his first job within a month.
Two months in, he was hired for a national TV spot, advertising for a big video game company — “I’m not allowed to say who they are.”
And the money started pouring in.
“They’d call me every week and pay me more money . ... When the dust all settled, I basically from the one contract had made (the money) I missed in the time that I wasn’t working,” said Gurnsey.
Now, having done just shy of 1,000 auditions, Gurnsey has acquired a variety of experience.
Spending last year in a wheelchair, “Nobody’s got wheels as good as me, because I can travel the entire world from my little studio here and I’m more mobile than anybody I know.”
He has voiced on American radio stations. He has done spots with Caterpillar Cat Footwear and Budweiser. He has worked for companies in New York, Tel Aviv and Korea.
He voiced Howard the Duck in a Marvel video game, which was initially a “bucket list item.”
“Now I’m like, ‘Pixar! Pixar, pick me up!’ ” said Gurnsey.
“I’ve got piles of dreams now. I’d love to do a video game where I’m the main character, so that I could play myself with my own voice.
“I’d love to do a feature film, I’d love to do a cartoon series.”
Gurnsey worked throughout aggressive treatment for his Lyme disease. Now off of antibiotics, his health has improved. He no longer uses a cane or wheelchair.
He hopes one day to be able to play paintball again.
“I love paintball so much, it was one of the few things that I actually cried about losing,” said Gurnsey. “I was so heavily addicted to the sport that I was willing to try even when my body would not.”