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 212 | Interview with Nancy Linari, Part 1
Welcome to episode 212 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 an actress who has performed in almost every type of acting there is, from theater, to commercials, to on-camera, to voice acting, to performance capture. She also has a habit of booking important roles in different areas of acting the first time she ever auditions for jobs in those areas! I’m talking about a consummate professional, Nancy Linari!
While Nancy has an extensive resume in theater, commercials, and on camera work, you may be most familiar with her work as Aunt May in the Sony Playstation series of Spider-Man games from 2018 and 2023. She’s also played Aunt May in the Disney XD Spider-Man animated series! But her voice over roles go back much farther than that! One of her biggest roles early in her voice acting career was Morticia in the Addams Family animated series by Hanna-Barbera, which was produced in the early 1990s. Nancy has worked on numerous animated shows since then such as Animaniacs, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Ben 10. In addition to the Spider-Man games, she’s played Medusa in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, the Lady of Blood in Legends of Runeterra, and the dragon Icewind in Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance, where I had the pleasure of playing Drizzt Du’orden. However, the first time I became aware of Nancy was when she and I both starred in the anime series Pokemon Horizons where she plays Diana, the grandmother of the main character Liko, and I play Friede, the leader of the Rising Volt Tacklers.
Nancy and I actually met while volunteering at our actor’s union, SAG-AFTRA. We both serve on committees at the union helping to negotiate fair wages and working conditions for our fellow actors. When I discovered that we were both working on Pokemon Horizons, I was eager to hear Nancy’s work on the series, and I was even more curious when she told me it was her first time ever dubbing anime! When I was finally able to listen to her performance, I was very impressed with how well she did! I had to know how someone who was so established in her career wasn’t just resting on her laurels, only doing what she was familiar with, but was curious enough to step outside her comfort zone to work on projects that posed new and interesting acting challenges. When I found out that the first performance capture job she ever auditioned for and booked was Aunt May in the Sony Spider-Man games, I knew I had to have her on the podcast!
In this episode, I begin our conversation by asking Nancy how she got started as a voice actor. It turns out that she and I are both originally from Chicago, so we had fun reminiscing about our Chi-town experiences during this interview! Nancy explains that her family always valued wit and the ability to be funny. In addition, her aunt was a professional opera singer, so the ability to perform was very important when Nancy was growing up. She was encouraged by one of her high school teachers to pursue acting, and then she went to college and majored in drama and speech. After college, she returned to Chicago where she began auditioning and booking roles at theme parks, in theater, and in commercials.
One of the shows she was in was successful enough that it toured the country, with one of the stops being in Los Angeles. This allowed her to make some connections with people in the entertainment industry in LA. While she did end up going back to Chicago after the run of her show was over, the idea of moving to LA really stuck with her. Eventually she and her partner decided to make the move and see if they could succeed there. It was slow going at first, but Nancy was able to book a role in a musical that was being directed by Gordon Hunt. Gordon was not only a director for theater, but he also worked as a voice director at Hanna-Barbera. My podcast listeners may remember that my previous guest, Amanda Wyatt, trained under Gordon when she was first getting her start as a voice director for video games.
Gordon liked Nancy’s work and started having her audition for the animated shows that he was working on. Nancy booked some small parts, but her breakout role was Morticia in the Addams family. More animation work followed, as well as video game work, a field that was brand new to Nancy when she first started auditioning for games in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. As new acting opportunities arose, like performance capture, Nancy became fascinated with them as well. She’s a self-proclaimed “class junkie” and would often attend workshops where she could learn about these new fields of entertainment. Her ability to absorb new information and adapt quickly to different performance environments is a testament to her dependable acting skills. There is so much wisdom in the story of how Nancy has developed and applied her craft and I’m so glad I get to share it with you!
VAM 211 | Interview with Amanda Wyatt, Part 2
Welcome to episode 211 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 second and final part of my interview with the amazingly talented voice director, Amanda Wyatt! Her resume includes games like Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War, Ghost of Tsushima, Assassin’s Creed 2, and Batman Arkham Knight. I’ve been fortunate enough to work on many games with her including the Batman Arkham Games, Halo Wars, and Horizon Zero Dawn. It’s always been a pleasure working with Amanda, so I was eager to have her on the podcast so she could share her insights from a voice director’s point of view with all of my listeners!
In the previous episode, Amanda told us how she originally got started as a voice director. She shared the story of how she went from being a dancer in her youth, to working as a producer at the famous audio production house, Soundeluxe, to eventually apprenticing under voice directors Kris Zimmerman and Gordon Hunt so that she could become a voi ce director herself. She learned so much from shadowing her mentors, and she sees her responsibilities as twofold: First, she wants to foster a creative environment which will help inspire her actors to give their best performances, and second, she needs to make sure that she keeps the production on time and on budget. These are challenging tasks, but with her background in both performing and stage managing, Amanda is perfectly positioned to be able to help the projects she’s working on to succeed both artistically and practically.
In this episode, as we continue our discussion, I ask Amanda what inspired her to become a voice director in the first place. She explains that while she was passionate about dancing when she was younger, and had many wonderful experiences working as a performer at Disney theme parks, when she finally had to face the staggering competition that exists in the world of on-camera acting and commercial work, she found it incredibly daunting. It seemed to her that succeeding as an actress required a lot of luck, and as someone who liked to be able to control her own circumstances, she was much more enthusiastic about working as a producer at Soundeluxe than she was about competing for acting jobs.
She also shares with me her advice for the aspiring voice actor. In this, Amanda echoes what many other guests and industry professionals have said before which is: having an interesting voice is not enough. In order to succeed as a voice actor, you must develop professionally competitive acting skills. There is nothing you can substitute for this, not impressive vocal tricks, not fancy recording equipment, nor any other shortcut or “hack” that can make you professionally competitive, if you don’t have reliable, effective acting skills. Amanda believes that taking traditional acting classes is very important for developing those skills.
She goes on to explain why many animation and game producers are reluctant to hire people outside of the Los Angeles area who don’t already have an extensive voice acting resume. She shares the logistical reasons for this, as well as addressing when studios are willing to make exceptions. While the challenges she describes are significant, I don’t think they’re insurmountable. It’s therefore very useful for any actors outside the Los Angeles marketplace to understand the resistance that LA producers have to hiring remote talent, so those remote actors can plan how to overcome those objections, and possibly make themselves more appealing to LA projects. Amanda has behind-the-scenes knowledge that is invaluable and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you. Let’s get started!
VAM 210 | Interview with Amanda Wyatt, Part 1
Welcome to episode 210 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 excited to share with you my interview with a voice director who’s worked on some of the most popular and influential games in the world, the amazingly talented, Amanda Wyatt! The list of games she’s voice directed is truly impressive including Death Stranding, Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War, Ghost of Tsushima, Outer Worlds, Assassin’s Creed 2, Batman Arkham Knight and Skylanders to name just a few! Amanda and I have worked on a number of games together including Halo Wars, Outer Worlds, The Batman Arkham Games, and Horizon Zero Dawn. I’ve always appreciated her insight, her guidance, and her attention to detail, and I’m grateful she was able to find the time to talk with me on the podcast!
In this episode, I begin our conversation by asking Amanda how she got started as a voice director. After working as a theme park performer at Disneyland in her youth, she eventually got a job as a production coordinator at a company called Soundeluxe which focused primarily on sound design and music scoring for films. This was in 1999, and video game developers were hiring Soundeluxe to help produce the sound for their projects. It was also around this time that developers started incorporating more voice acting into their games as well. Since the developers themselves rarely had connections with Hollywood actors, they would reach out to Soundeluxe to see if they could hire and record voice actors to perform in their games. This means that Amanda was there to help coordinate the production of some of the earliest games in LA that utilized voice actors.
Amanda contacted voice directors she knew in order to help Soundeluxe cast and record, including such well-known talents from the animation world as Kris Zimmerman and Gordon Hunt. After working for many years at Soundeluxe and achieving the position of producer, Amanda decided to take a break so she could give birth to two wonderful twin daughters. After the arrival of her daughters, she realized that she would not be able to work full time as a producer and also take care of her newborns. She needed to pursue a career path that had more schedule flexibility, so she decided to reach out to Kris Zimmerman and ask if she could become Kris’s apprentice as a voice director. Amanda wasn’t sure how Kris would respond, but fortunately, Kris agreed to mentor Amanda. Amanda shadowed both Kris and Gordon Hunt to learn their approach to directing voice actors. Eventually, they decided that Amanda was ready to work on her own without their guidance or support and she has gone on to have a hugely successful career ever since.
As a voice actor, your primary collaborator on any project is the voice director. They are the one you work with most closely and they’re also the person you depend on to help inform you about your character, and guide you to providing the most believable performance. Often, voice directors are also helping to cast the project they’re working on. Therefore, it’s vitally important to understand what they are looking for in the auditions they get from actors. In this segment, Amanda shares with us what kind of auditions she finds most compelling and which ones she finds lackluster. Listen closely to the advice she shares since it will help you as an actor to be more appealing to the directors you audition for. As an added bonus, if you can understand the pressures and responsibilities of being a voice director, you’ll empathize with what they’re dealing with in the studio, and you’ll be that much better a collaborator whenever you’re working with them. So pay close attention! Amanda has wonderful advice to impart to all of us!
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!