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!
Leave a Reply