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 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 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!
VAM 197 | Interview with Josh Petersdorf, Part 2
Welcome to episode 197 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 voice actor and theme park voice performer, Josh Petersdorf! You may know Josh from his work in games like League of Legends, Fire Emblem: Engage, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, and Overwatch. He’s worked on the English language dubs of anime shows like Aggretsuko and on live action shows like Project “Gemini”. He’s also the voices of both Megatron and Optimus Prime at the Universal Studios Theme Park during the live action show that takes place before the Transformers 3D ride.
That last time we spoke, Josh shared with me how he became a voice actor. He was inspired to pursue performing at a young age after watching his sisters perform in dance recitals. However, during high school, he focused more on athletics, and it wasn’t until after he was living on his own that he realized that he wanted to pursue voice acting as a career. He moved to LA, started taking classes, and was fortunate enough to be able to book work at the Universal Studios Theme Park and to also get agent representation. He started booking voice over work, but when he landed the role of Roadhog in Overwatch, it definitely took his career to a new level.
In this episode, I ask what inspired Josh to become a performer in the first place. He shares with me how much the artists from his childhood influenced him to try to create things himself, and how his love of pro wrestling and his nostalgia for 80’s cartoons still inform his artistry today! The characters from the entertainment he consumed often served as role models for him and helped shape not only his creative sensibilities but his personal development as well. He and I also talk about how the most successful voice actors are always looking to expand their capabilities and grow into different areas or niches of the industry. And finally, Josh gives me his advice for the aspiring voice actor, which at its core seems to contain a paradox: He suggests that actors both be ready to work hard and also be easy on themselves. He thinks they should both be demanding when it comes to their own skills, but forgiving as well. It’s a fascinating contradiction that I actually think you’ll find very insightful as we explore it in this episode.
VAM 196 | Interview with Josh Petersdorf, Part 1
Welcome to episode 196 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 excited to share with you the first part of my interview with voice actor and theme park voice performer, Josh Petersdorf! Josh works extensively in games where he uses his booming voice to embody characters such as Galio in League of Legends, Morion in Fire Emblem: Engage, Stonefist in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, and most notably, Roadhog in Overwatch. He’s worked on the English language dubs of anime like Aggretsuko and live action shows like Project “Gemini”. He’s also worked for many years at the Universal Studios Theme Park portraying the voices of both Megatron and Optimus Prime during the live action show that takes place before the Transformers 3D ride. This process involves a stilt walker putting on a large Transformers costume and interacting with the people in line for the ride. Josh then provides the voice for the person in costume, speaking in real time to the park goers and improvising dialogue to keep them entertained. It’s an amazing collaborative performance that is fascinating to watch!
As we begin our interview, Josh explains to me how he got started as a voice actor. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, where he watched his younger sisters perform in plays and dance recitals, and he decided that he wanted to be a performer as well. He got into an advanced theater class at his school when he was in 7th grade, and participated in the debate team. However, when Josh went to high school, he got more involved in sports, specifically water polo, and had less time for acting. After high school, he attended college briefly, but decided to leave college to pursue his interests in music. He made friends with many creative musicians in the Bay area who also had access to all sorts of recording equipment. In addition to making music, he and his friends would have fun doing fan dubs of live action Japanese Power Ranger-style shows like Kamen Rider. Over time, Josh realized that he wanted to pursue acting more, so he eventually moved to Los Angeles with the goal of becoming a voice actor. He started taking classes to develop his skills, and was also working a restaurant job in order to support himself at the time. A friend at the restaurant told him about an opportunity to audition to be a voice for the live Transformers show at the Universal Studios Theme Park. So Josh auditioned and booked the job. As his confidence grew, he was also able to find agent representation, and one day, his agent sent him an audition for a character in a new game from Blizzard Entertainment which turned out to be Roadhog in Overwatch. Josh was then called back and eventually cast as Roadhog which helped his career blossom even more.
Listening to this overview of Josh’s journey towards becoming a professional voice actor, it might seem like his path was relatively straightforward and almost inevitable. What the summary leaves out, however, are all of the challenges, setbacks, and uncertainty that Josh endured on his way to discovering what he truly wanted to do and how to go about achieving his goals. He and I spend the majority of this episode talking in depth about all of these issues. Josh is very candid with me about what he went through and what it took for him to grow both as a person and as a performer. It’s always been my goal with this podcast to share the reality of what it takes to become a successful professional artist, and I’m so grateful for Josh’s willingness to give both me and my listeners these honest insights into his struggles and his triumphs. I think you’ll find his story very inspiring!