VAM 190 | Interview with Courtenay Taylor, Part 1
Welcome to episode 190 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 extraordinary Courtenay Taylor! Courtenay has a signature sound to her voice that she’s been using to great effect in both commercials and character work since the early 2000’s! You may have heard her performances in games where she’s played Juhani in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Ada Wong in numerous Resident Evil titles, the Female Player Character in Fallout Legacy, and Jack in the Mass Effect series of games. In animation she’s famous for playing Starla in The Regular Show and K.O. in OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes. In addition to her voice acting work, she’s also helps run NerdsVote, a non-partisan organization that encourages nerds of any fandom to register to vote and participate in American democracy! You can find out more information about it at NerdsVote.com.
In this episode, we begin our conversation by discussing how Courtenay got started as a voice actor. Her acting background is a little unconventional. She initially got involved in theater in high school as a makeup artist. She was a fan of the punk band, Siouxsie and the Banshees and would often do her own makeup in the style of the lead singer. A theater teacher at her high school admired her look and asked if she would help do the makeup for a show that he was directing. She agreed. Working on the production made her curious about acting, so she tried an acting class in High School, but she did not find it rewarding.
In college, she decided to try again and enrolled in another acting class, thinking that it would be an easy way for her to get a good grade. She was surprised at how hard the class turned out to be and at how demanding her teacher was. Fortunately, Courtenay tends to excel when she is challenged, or when people think she won’t be able to achieve something. That sort of criticism motivates her to prove the naysayers wrong, so she redoubled her efforts to improve her acting abilities. She was certainly put to the test when she later auditioned for a graduate level acting program. She was told by the man auditioning her that she would never work because her voice sounded too damaged and that the audience in a large theater would never be able to hear her clearly.
When she told her acting teacher about this negative feedback, the teacher suggested that she try taking a voice over class. As soon as Courtenay got behind the microphone, she felt like she was home. Voice over allowed her to explore her emotional life without needing to project her voice to the back of a large theater. She also didn’t have to memorize her lines, a skill she had always struggled with when working on stage.
Once she realized that voice over was her niche, Courtenay had a clear focus to her career. She eventually moved to Los Angeles, where she faced many other challenges while breaking into the business. But I’ll let her tell you that story in her own words!