VAM 217 | Interview with Mara Junot, Part 2
Welcome to episode 217 of the Voice Acting Mastery podcast with yours truly, Crispin Freeman!
As always, you can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:
http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/podcast
This is the second and final part of my interview with the vocal shape-shifter, Mara Junot! As I mentioned in the previous episode, Mara identifies as non-binary, but accepts both “she” and “they” pronouns. For the purposes of this podcast, I will be using “she/her” when referring to Mara so as to avoid pluralization confusion during these episodes. You may know Mara’s voice acting work in animation on shows like Curious George, Boss Baby: Back in the Crib, Blaze and the Monster Machines, and Arcane. In Video Games she’s been in Destiny 2, League of Legends, Mortal Kombat and Marvel Rivals. In Anime she’s worked on Ishura, Tezuka’s anime, Pluto, and Mara and I are both cast in Pokemon Horizons.
In the previous episode, Mara explained how she got started as a voice actress. She originally started in voice over as a radio DJ, and thought that was going to be her dream job. However, because of management changes at the station, and her own desire to grow artistically, she decided to leave radio and pursue voice acting full time. After spending 16 hours a day on average researching and studying voice over, she began to build a career for herself working remotely, first in Louisiana, then later in Colorado. After booking a role in the hit animated series Arcane, she realized she needed to move to Los Angeles to take her career to the next level.
In this episode, I ask Mara what inspired her to become a performer in the first place. She shares with me a vision that her mother had of Mara standing on a stage, speaking to a large audience who was enraptured. This idea of Mara using her voice to uplift others became a guiding principle in her life. She and I then talk about how important it is to have a good work/life balance as a performer. Mara has found it too easy at times to overcommit and burn herself out! She’s a big believer in naps, which I endorse heartily as well!
We then go back in time to when Mara first performed in the theater as a child, and how an experience she had on stage which could’ve been very embarrassing, actually helped her feel more empowered as a person and as an artist. It’s a formative story from her youth, and discussing it on the podcast helps Mara realize just how much it has influenced her artistic journey ever since! She then shares with me her advice for the aspiring voice actor, and how important it is to be patient with yourself as you pursue an acting career. Mara is a big believer in finding your authentic self and sharing that in your performances. Finding and revealing your true self can take a lot of introspection, self-honesty, training, and courage. The world is full of actors who seem to have become overnight successes, but if you ask them about it, you’ll find out that they’ve actually been practicing their craft for years! Mara encourages you to be good to yourself as you grow as an actor. She is courageous not only in the pursuit of her career, but also in how willing she is to share her own trials and tribulations as an artist. So without further ado, here’s Mara!
VAM 216 | Interview with Mara Junot, Part 1
Welcome to episode 216 of the Voice Acting Mastery podcast with yours truly, Crispin Freeman!
As always, you can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:
http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/podcast
Welcome to the first part of my interview with the vocal shape-shifter, Mara Junot! Before we begin, I want to acknowledge here that Mara identifies as non-binary, but accepts both “she” and “they” pronouns. For the purposes of this podcast, I will be using “she/her” when referring to Mara so as to avoid pluralization confusion during these episodes. Now, you may be familiar with Mara’s work in animation where she’s played Marlene in Curious George, R&D Baby Simmons in Boss Baby: Back in the Crib, Superhero Narrator, Tiger Statue, and Betty Blueprint from Blaze and the Monster Machines, and Shoola in the hit show, Arcane. In Video Games she’s played Ikora Rey in Destiny 2, Evelyn in League of Legends, Sindel in Mortal Kombat and Storm in Marvel Rivals. In Anime she’s played Elea the Red Tag in Ishura, Helena in Tezuka’s anime, Pluto, and Mara and I have the great pleasure of working together on Pokemon Horizons where she plays Orla, the chief engineer of our airship the Brave Olivine.
In this episode, Mara and I begin our discussion with the question I ask all of my guests: how did she get started as a voice actor? Mara’s path to voice acting is a bit unique because she actually began her career on the microphone as a Radio DJ! She was living in a town called Houma in Louisiana, about an hour southwest of New Orleans, working a corporate job that she hated. She then found an opportunity to audition for her local radio station. She reached out to a friend of hers who had some experience in radio, and he helped her put together a recording demonstrating her DJ skills. The station liked what they heard, and she was fortunate enough to get hired to host one of the shows on their county music station. She eventually expanded into DJing at two other stations owned by the same company: a classic rock station, and a soft rock station. Working as a radio DJ was a dream come true for Mara and she thought she was on top of the world!
Unfortunately, after about 7 or 8 years, Mara began to feel like she had stopped growing. She was working all the time, but didn’t feel like there was any more career advancement for her in radio. There was also a change of management at the company which resulted in some personality conflicts amongst the employees, and Mara realized she needed to switch careers.
She had always enjoyed acting as kid in school, but had never felt comfortable embracing what she thought was the acting lifestyle. Mara is an introvert who values her privacy. She didn’t know how to pursue acting without having to become a public figure. That’s when she realized that voice acting might be a way for her to pursue her acting ambitions, retain a sense of anonymity, and still work from her current location in Louisiana. It wasn’t going to be easy, but she was determined to figure out a way to make it work.
Mara began by finding out everything she could about pursuing a voice over career. She scoured websites for information, she started signing up for pay-to-play sites like Voice123.com where you can pay a membership fee to get access to auditions for certain types of voice over work. She even listened to this podcast to help her find out more about the industry! Early on, Mara knew that she wanted to become a household name in voice over. She wanted to have similar name recognition to someone like Morgan Freeman. She also understood that such an ambitious goal would require a lot of commitment. She would spend all day studying voice over, sometimes 16 to 18 hours a day, doing everything she could to expand her knowledge and her skills.
All of that hard work started paying off. She began getting work, building up a list of repeat clients, and discovering that she could in fact have a career in voice over outside of her experiences in radio. However, in order to become as recognizable as Morgan Freeman, there were some major hurdles she had to overcome. Initially, she had to learn to overcome her reluctance to meet with industry people in person, especially at big voice over conferences. Once she overcame that hurdle, she then realized that in order to get her voice acting career to the next level, and work on the types of projects she had always dreamed of, she was going to need to move to Los Angeles. After moving to LA, she still had more work to do: looking inward to come to grips with who she really was as an artist, and how best to share her authentic self in her performances. It’s a compelling and heartfelt journey, and I’m grateful to Mara for being willing to share such very personal details with us. Let’s get started!
VAM 215 | Interview with David Errigo Jr., Part 2
Welcome to episode 215 of the Voice Acting Mastery podcast with yours truly, Crispin Freeman!
As always, you can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:
http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/podcast
I’m back with the second part of my interview with the ridiculously talented David Errigo Jr.! David has worked on animated shows like Tiny Toons Looniversity, X-men ’97, Phineas and Ferb, and Ridley Jones where he was nominated for an emmy for his performance as the character Dudley! In video games, he’s been in Disney Speedstorm, Disney Dreamlight Valley, Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions, and Shin Megami Tensei V and V: Vengeance. In anime he’s worked on Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, Tezuka’s anime Pluto, and the new production of Ranma 1/2!
In the previous episode, David shared with me how he got started as a voice actor. In Middle School he began taking acting classes and singing in his school choir. He studied acting in college, taught acting at a Children’s theater company after college, did a tour as an actor on a Disney Cruise Ship, and worked at regional theaters around the country acting and singing in plays and musicals. When he finally got to New York to pursue a career on Broadway, he discovered his love for voice acting in animation and realized that’s what he was meant to do in life. He knew then that he would need to move to Los Angeles in order to work on the kinds of animated shows and games that fascinated him. By 2016 he had arrived in LA and was making as many connections as he could to further his voice acting goals. With his prodigious talent, his breadth of experience, and the connections he had developed in the entertainment industry during his time as a stage actor, it didn’t take long before he signed with an agency and was working on some of the most high profile projects in Hollywood.
In the second part of our talk together, I ask David what inspired him to become a performer in the first place. He refers again to his experience watching his father’s face light up at a Bruce Springsteen concert and how that made David want to bring that level of satisfaction to as many people as possible through performance. I dig a little deeper to try and discover why it was so important to him to inspire that level of delight in others. This opens up a number of fascinating topics about how rewarding it can be to bring joy to other people, as well as how David’s father taught him values that helped shape who David is as a person and as an artist. We then discuss David’s fascination with mimicking the voices he heard in the cartoons from his childhood. He considers exposure to those shows to be vital to his voice acting education.
David has said in previous interviews that his brain is “beautifully broken”. I ask him to explain what he means by that. He tells me that he feels compelled to study, classify, and internalize cartoons and the voice acting performances in them. He just can’t help himself. He knows that the brains of many of his colleagues work the same way and the knowledge they’ve amassed is invaluable when they’re portraying their own characters. After I ask David for his advice for aspiring voice actors, he then actually applies his extensive knowledge of cartoons, by combining it with his impressive acting skills, to demonstrate in real time the difference between simply imitating the voice of a character, and actually embodying that character and portraying them in an authentic way. Listen closely, because’s David’s performance is not only an impressive display, but it’s also a mini-master class in professional voice acting. I’m truly honored that I get to share it with you!
VAM 213 | Interview with Nancy Linari, Part 2
Welcome to episode 213 of the Voice Acting Mastery podcast with yours truly, Crispin Freeman!
As always, you can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:
http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/podcast
Welcome back to the second part of my interview with an actress who has worked in almost every different kind of acting environment you can think of: the talented and versatile Nancy Linari! She’s worked on animated shows like Hanna-Barbera’s version of the Addams Family, as well as Animaniacs, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Ben 10. In the world of video games, she’s worked on Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Legends of Runeterra, and Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance. She’s also working with yours truly on the new Pokemon Horizons anime series! However, Nancy is probably most famous for playing Aunt May in both the Disney XD Spider-man animated series, as well as the Sony Playstation series of Spider-Man games from 2018 and 2023.
In the previous episode, Nancy shared with me how she got started as a voice actor and how it grew organically out of her pursuit of an acting career in Chicago. After graduating college with a degree in theater, she started working at a theme park in the Chicagoland area while also pursuing theater and commercial work. One of her theater shows toured the country with one of their stops being in Los Angeles. This allowed Nancy to explore the acting marketplace in LA and to make some industry connections. She eventually decided to move to Los Angeles in order to grow her acting career there.
As she booked theater work in LA, she began to meet influential people in the entertainment industry including Gordon Hunt, who was the head voice director at Hanna-Barbera. He started auditioning her for animated projects, and this led to her booking some smaller roles in animation, and eventually booking a lead role as Morticia in the Addams Family animated series. Nancy also became curious about performance capture work for video games. She started taking classes for it and eventually booked the part of Aunt May for the Playstation Spider-man video games, which just happened to be her very first performance capture audition! Nancy’s journey is one of curiosity, versatility, and resiliency. She knew that to survive as an actress, she would need to be able to act well in a variety of different performance environments. This has allowed her to continue working in various fields of the entertainment industry whenever there’s a slow down in other areas.
In this episode, as we continue our discussion, I ask Nancy what inspired her to become a performer in the first place. She shares with me a story about the first time she got laughs from an audience. She found the experience exhilarating, especially since she was only 7 years old at the time! That moment instilled a love of comedy in her that has served her well throughout her career. It also helped her understand what her strengths were as a performer. She realized that her archetype as an actor was more comedic, and less serious. That didn’t mean she couldn’t play serious roles, just that her competitive advantage was that she could “find the funny” in whatever project she was working on. That’s a very valuable skill to have as a performer!
After that, Nancy and I talk about European clowning, a style of acting that I also discussed in my interview with Darin De Paul. While Nancy has never done European clowning personally, she did study it academically in school. European clown training can really help an actor discover what their inherent nature is as a performer, as well as how to embrace one’s essential archetype. Nancy also talks about how important it is to become proficient with recording technology as an actor, since so often these days actors are expected to be their own engineers and camera operators.
And then, to conclude our conversation, Nancy shares her advice for the aspiring voice actor. Like so many before her, she says that believable acting skills should be a voice actor’s highest priority, so I ask her how she learned acting. While she is a self-admitted acting class junkie, she also acknowledges that she’s often learned the most about acting from actually doing it. She compares it to an athlete having to continually train physically in order to be in peak condition to perform. There’s no substitute for experience, and as an actor, the more opportunities you have to practice your skills, the better you will become at them. This is also why Nancy enjoys doing theater so much. It allows her to practice and test her skills night after night. Each time she gets up to act, she may try something a little different to see what works and what doesn’t. This iterative process of curiosity, exploration, and discovery, is what has helped her sustain such a long and varied career. I hope my listeners can benefit from her mindset and I’m so glad I get to share her wisdom with all of you!
VAM 209 | Interview with Zeke Alton, Part 2
Welcome to episode 209 of the Voice Acting Mastery podcast with yours truly, Crispin Freeman!
As always, you can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:
http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/podcast
Get ready for the second part of my interview with the hardest working actor I know, Mr. Zeke Alton! Zeke is a multi-talented performer who does voice acting, performance capture, and also works on-camera. He’s been in major AAA game titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Starfield, and the Callisto Protocol. He’s also worked on TV shows like S.W.A.T and movies such as My Dead Friend Zoe starring Morgan Freeman and Sonequa Martin-Green. Zeke is not only a member of the actor’s union, SAG-AFTRA, but also serves on many of their contract negotiation committees helping to secure artistic rights, fair wages, and safe working conditions for his fellow union members. In addition, Zeke is also a founding board member of NAVA, the National Association of Voice Actors, who work tirelessly to promote the interests and protect the rights of all voice actors regardless of union affiliation.
In the last episode, Zeke outlined for us the fascinating journey of how he transitioned from being a pilot in the Navy for 20 years, into becoming a working actor in Los Angeles. It’s a very inspiring story and if you haven’t heard it yet, I strongly encourage you to listen to the previous episode before continuing with this one. Even though he decided to purse an acting career later in his life, Zeke didn’t let that dissuade him from breaking in to the entertainment industry. In fact, knowing that he might be at a disadvantage, he made sure to be methodical and diligent in his approach. This focus and determination served him well. It not only allowed him to develop the necessary skills to be professionally competitive, but more importantly, it helped him hone a mindset that gave him the resilience and the resourcefulness to deal with the challenges he faced. One of the resources he found helpful at the time was this podcast! He started listening to my episodes back in 2015 and he thanked me for the helpful advice he found on my show. I’m so honored to have contributed to his success!
In this episode, I ask Zeke what inspired him to become a performer in the first place. For Zeke, the moments when he’s acting feel like absolute magic. He goes into what some describe as a “flow state” where the rest of the world falls away, and the only thing that matters is him performing as the character. He finds this state so compelling that he’s willing to manage and deal with all the more mundane aspects of an acting career in order to experience it. Zeke also shares with me his advice for the aspiring actor and how important he thinks it is for actors to understand that if they want to be commercially successful, they need to think of themselves as contributors to an entertainment business enterprise. We then talk about Artificial Intelligence, a subject I dearly wanted to discuss with Zeke because of his extensive knowledge about not only the technology of AI, but also the current business practices of the companies trying to use AI in their creative projects. There’s great advice in this episode, both about developing your performance abilities, and about protecting those hard won skills from being exploited by technology. I hope you find it as insightful and useful as I did!
VAM 208 | Interview with Zeke Alton, Part 1
Welcome to episode 208 of the Voice Acting Mastery podcast with yours truly, Crispin Freeman!
As always, you can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:
http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/podcast
I’m very pleased to present the first part of my interview with one of the most industrious men I know, Mr. Zeke Alton. Zeke works in many different areas of the entertainment industry including voice acting, performance capture, and also on-camera. You may know his voice acting work as Terrell Wolf and William Peck in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Quantum in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Mike Abadio and Lendel Green in Starfield, and his amazing performance as Elias Porter in The Callisto Protocol. Zeke also works on camera and has been in The TV series S.W.A.T. as well as the movie My Dead Friend Zoe starring Morgan Freeman and Sonequa Martin-Green. Zeke is a member of the actor’s union, SAG-AFTRA, and serves on many of their negotiation committees helping to secure artistic rights, fair wages, and safe working conditions for performers. As if that weren’t enough, Zeke is also a founding board member of NAVA, the National Association of Voice Actors, who work tirelessly to promote the interests and protect the rights of all voice actors regardless of union affiliation.
We begin our discussion with Zeke telling me how he broke into the world of show business. His journey is incredibly unique. His father was in the Air Force and stationed in various places in Europe. Zeke was born in Italy and raised in England where his mother’s family resided. Eventually his father moved his family back to the U.S., and after spending his early childhood overseas, Zeke ended up going to High School in America. While he did study acting in elementary and high school, he didn’t act in college, but instead got a scholarship through the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps, commonly known as ROTC, and focused on pursuing a military career.
After graduating college, Zeke joined the Navy as a pilot and subsequently achieved the esteemed status of test pilot, flying new and experimental aircraft. He ended up serving in the Navy for 20 years. He knew that after those 20 years were up he had some options available to him: he could choose to stay in the Navy which most likely would have led to a distinguished career being promoted up through the ranks, or he had the option to retire and enter civilian aviation as a commercial pilot which was another common career path for Navy fliers. Zeke did neither, however. Instead he chose to pursue a career as an actor. It was a momentous decision, and one that he did not take lightly. He knew that if he was going to pursue a career in entertainment, that he would need to approach it with the same focus, dedication, and commitment as he would give to any goal that he attempted in the military.
Zeke took years to study, plan, prepare, and train as an actor before he finally decided to make the move to Los Angeles. He arrived in LA in 2019 and has made great progress in his acting career ever since! The story of how he went from being a Navy test pilot to deciding he had to pursue a career as a performer is a fascinating study not only in what steps you can take in order to be successful as an actor, but also in how important it is to adopt an effective mindset so you can achieve your acting goals. Zeke attributes the bulk of his success to the professional attitude he adopted, which helped him approach his acting goals in a reliable and effective manner. I hope my listeners can take inspiration from his journey, as well as adopt his practical approach to pursuing an acting career. So without further ado, here’s Zeke!