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 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!
VAM 207 | Acting Is Inherently Uncomfortable, That’s Why Great Acting Takes Courage
Welcome to episode 207 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
While the majority of my podcast episodes in recent years have been interviews, I wanted to take this episode to talk about a problematic misunderstanding that I see too often lately amongst people who are thinking about getting into voice acting. It’s a misunderstanding that I’m finding more and more common in my students as well, so I thought it would be a good idea to address it head on. I get the impression both from reading online comments on social media sites, and from my interactions with my students in my classes, that too many people out there think that voice acting is the easiest form of acting, that it requires less of you than other forms of acting like film or theater acting, and that acting as an activity should be comfortable and easy to do. This mindset often boils down to a belief that goes something like this: “How hard could it be to talk into a microphone, get attention, and get paid?”
There’s many reasons for this flawed belief. Some of these reasons have been around for a while, and some have been exacerbated by social media and the increased mental and emotional health challenges reported by more recent generations. Never in my teaching career have I had so many students citing “anxiety” as their number one stumbling block when it comes to acting, and never have I seen such a mismatch of expectations vs. reality when it comes to what people think is required of them to become professionally competitive as a voice actor.
While historically, people have often assumed that acting was the least demanding of the performing arts, online marketers have taken this misconception and turned it into a selling point, using the leverage of the internet and social media platforms to advertise just how easy it is to work and make money as a voice over artist. I can’t tell you the number of ads I’ve seen from “voice acting experts” who say things like, “If you give me 10 minutes of your time, and watch this video to the end, I’ll share with you the secrets that the voice over industry doesn’t want you to know!” Or, “Let me show you this one weird trick that will allow you to make money on demand by recording yourself at home in your pajamas!” Or, “There’s so much work out there that there’s no competition. People want to pay you to just talk into a microphone, with no artistic development, personal improvement, or familiarity with the industry required!”
Okay, that last one was a stretch, but not a big stretch, and unfortunately this kind of messaging is all too common online today. It offers quick solutions, cheat codes, or easy income with minimal effort, when building a voice acting career really takes artistic dedication, diligent practice, and a lot of self-actualization. This predatory grift really upsets me. It not only promotes greed and laziness, but it also targets the anxiety issues that I mentioned earlier. Anxious people want to hear that voice acting is easy and that they can make money by hiding in their closets and talking into a microphone.
And perhaps they can, for a while. The democratization of affordable recording equipment and the ability to work remotely have indeed fostered an environment where it seems like anyone can make money in voice over. But the specter of AI is looming over the horizon, and soon the market for that so-called “easier” voice work will start to erode. As AI voices proliferate and are used more often for entry level or lower budget projects, an aspiring voice actor will need to become much better than AI in order to compete in the marketplace. Soon there will be nowhere to hide from the reality that professional acting requires one to overcome their limitations, not capitulate to them or look for hacks to avoid facing them.
I’d like to explain to my listeners exactly why acting is such a tricky art form to master, why becoming a professionally competitive voice actor is so challenging, and to hopefully bring some honesty and clarity to what it really takes to embody characters in such a way that you captivate and delight an audience. This advice is not meant to discourage any aspiring voice actors, but rather to inspire them to meet the challenge of pursuing a voice acting career head on, with a clear understanding of the true skills and mindset they need to become successful.
VAM 206 | Interview with Lauren Mayfield, Part 2
Welcome to episode 206 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 part of my interview with an accomplished voice actress who just happens to be a former student of mine and one of my class assistants, Lauren Mayfield! Lauren has gone from studying with me in class, to helping me coach my students, to booking work as a professional voice actress, and even securing representation at one of the most prestigious agencies in Los Angeles, Sutton Barth and Venari also known as SBV. I was delighted when she told me that we were both working on the same video game together, providing voices for characters in Starfield by Bethesda. You may also know Lauren’s work in games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III where she plays Raptor, Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising where she plays Societte, and Tower of God: New World where she plays Po Bidau Blanc. It’s always so satisfying when I get to watch one of my students navigate the transition to becoming an accomplished colleague of mine in the voice acting world and I’m so proud of Lauren’s achievements!
In the previous episode, we talked about how Lauren got her start as a voice actor. She had loved acting and especially musicals when she was young. Then she’d had the opportunity to work at both Disney World and Disneyland, which she enjoyed thoroughly. However, it wasn’t until she was passed over for a position at Disneyland that she decided to focus more of her attention on voice acting. She took classes in Orange County, California where she was living, and she also took classes with me at Voice Acting Mastery. She was a dutiful actress who tried to do everything right and follow what seemed to be the conventional wisdom at the time about how one could break into voice acting. This included booking parts in anime dubs at first, and then moving on to other projects after that. This was certainly my experience when I started as a voice actor in the late 90’s. Lauren discovered, however, that her path was going to be different. After struggling to make much headway in anime, she finally found her niche in video games which is where her career really took off. Her success in games helped her secure agency representation, which has opened even more career opportunities for her!
In this episode, I ask Lauren what inspired her to become a performer in the first place. She revisits how she loved performing and especially musical theater from a young age, and shares how she had a passion for fantastical, larger than life storytelling. She was eager to explore how she could pursue a career as a performer. Over time, she began to realize that a musical theater career would not give her the kind of stability she desired, neither financially, nor in terms of lifestyle. She didn’t want to have to travel for work, and the life of a theater actor tends to be very nomadic. Voice acting became a way for her to pursue acting, apply her vocal and singing techniques, and still remain close to home. This subject leads quite naturally into a discussion about how important it is to be always checking in with yourself to make sure that you’re pursuing goals that are truly what you want and that you aren’t working towards some accomplishment that won’t give you satisfaction. Lauren and I also discuss how competitive voice acting has become in recent years due to the rising popularity of games, animation, and anime.
After that, I ask Lauren to share her advice for the aspiring voice actor. While she knows that teachers and coaches will often stress how much work it takes to be successful as a voice actor, and Lauren herself can personally attest to the amount of time, effort, and dedication she has put towards achieving her voice acting goals, she also says that it’s important to know when to relax and trust that you’re doing good work, so you can avoid trying to force things to happen. One way to achieve that balance between effort and relaxation is to make sure that you’re as well rounded a human being as possible, with activities and interests outside the field of acting. Another method is to take the pursuit of voice acting less personally and to decouple your own value as a human being from your professional accomplishments. Ironically, the less personally you take things in the voice over industry, the more relaxed you’ll become, and the more authentically you’ll be able to share your own artistry with others. These insights from Lauren are a lovely way to wrap up our discussion, and I’m so glad I get to share them with my listeners!