Voice-over acting nice work if you can get it
LOS ANGELES — Many beginning young actors think they can worm their way into show business through voice-over work. But lending your voice to a cartoon or a goofy commercial can be more difficult than landing a speaking part on a TV series.
“It seems like a quarter of the people do the majority of the work,” says Tom Kenny, the hyperventilating SpongeBob of SpongeBob SquarePants. “It’s like being a Navy SEAL. I’m really proud to be a member of this select group of people.
“It’s really hard to bust into. I’ve done on-camera stuff and made a living as a standup comedian for years, but voice-over was what I really wanted to do. I can only speak for myself, but I know that voice-over was much harder for me to break into than standup comedy or on-camera work ... It was the hardest. I guess it’s like everything in show business, it’s gaining experience, making connections, relationships — like any freelancer’s lot in life. And it was just dumb right-place, right-time luck.”
Among voice-over talent, there are certain performers considered the top of their class. Worker beavers include Frank Welker, Billy West, Cree Summer and Peter Cullen, who toil mostly behind the cameras, manipulating their voices like gymnasts in free form. Welker, for instance, has made a career by approximating animal sounds. It’s Welker you hear when Curious George babbles or when Puss in Boots meows.
But more and more well-known actors are confiscating the mic.
Ray Romano played Manny in the Ice Age films. “It takes getting used to,” he says of voice-over. “The best thing is the fantasy of it all, and here you can relate to everybody, adults and kids. It’s timeless. It’ll last. The actual procedure for an actor is kind of hard to get used to because it’s just you in a studio ... I’ve never been in the recording studio with another actor. We’re always on other sides of the country, or this and that, and you have to do it in piecemeal.”
Patrick Warburton, who’s Joe Swanson on Family Guy, Rip Riley on Archer and on scores of video games, says he likes the ease it offers. “Voice-over work takes a couple of hours in your pajamas,” he says. “Half-hour TV is short days, so my kids see more of me than I saw of my dad. And he had an office seven minutes from our house. He was a big surgeon, had a lot on his plate, a lot of time at home dictating, and he was under a lot of stress. My kids — I’m around all the time, sometimes they wonder if I work.”
It was a revelation when Antonio Banderas stole the show as the Puss in Boots in Shrek 2 (though Welker did the meowing).
“It’s totally different than what I thought it was going to be,” says Banderas.
“For an actor like me who came here … years ago without speaking the language, the opportunity to use my voice has kind of made me proud somehow. But it’s something, a method that was very unusual from what I thought animated movies would be,” he says.