Voice Actors: Hollywood’s Forgotten Stars
I remember when I was 13 and first really understood what voice-acting was. It was at the height of my first fandom experience: Transformers Beast Wars. Long after the active fanbase for the show was dead and had already moved on to Transformers Animated, I was picking through ancient fanfiction with a fine-tooth comb. Having long exhausted the archives of Beast Wars International during my lunch breaks at my middle school, I started picking through their other sections not so much focused on the characters I deeply fell in love with (Depth Charge, my beloved…Tarantulas, my loathed and beloved…). Instead, I found myself reading interviews that the community had done with the voice actors and the one that stuck with me was the one they did with Scott McNeil.
For context: Scott McNeil is the voice actor who plays not one, not two, but four distinct characters in Transformers Beast Wars. Each with voices so distinctive that on the first watch, you would not be able to source them all originating from the same voice-box. From the scratchy and melodramatic Dinobot to the snappy and Space Brooklyn-born Rattrap to the wheezing and tortured Waspinator to the noble and Good Boy Silverbolt, these four voices are all distinct enough that when they speak to each other, you would not be able to tell that they were all mixed in the same set of vocal cords. McNeil was inspired by a similar revelation as a child: the man who did the voice-over for the Haunted Mansion (you might know that voice as Thurl Ravenscroft) was also behind the Pillsbury Dough Boy.
And I have to ask: what’s happening to that these days? Where’s the flavor and artistry, and mystique of voice acting? So many times, I go to see an animated movie, and there are celebrity voices in them (sometimes, the entirety of the film is in them; I can’t separate out Ash from Sing from Scarlet Johansen’s normal speaking voice), and it’s just…a lot of it feels lost. That sort of magic of someone being talented at shifting their voices such that you can no longer recognize them. And before anyone says anything about the Critical Role founders, I promise I am aware of them. But I’m not talking about the television and video game sphere they feature in frequently: I’m talking about Hollywood.
About movies made by safe, paint-by-numbers studios like Illumination or Disney. Especially as Nintendo taps Illumination to create and produce a Mario movie, something we knew about as far back as 2018, only now to get public backlash as the announcement of Chris Pratt’s role as that Mario movie’s voice actor. I promise, I don’t mean to be patronizing; it’s just…if you watched the details beforehand, there was no other outcome. For example, when Illumination was given the Grinch to adapt into a movie, instead of getting a voice actor for their title character, they signed on fandom darling Benedict Cumberpatch to play him. In fact, the main cast is entirely TV personalities and live-action actors; talented voice actors like Tara Strong, Bill Farmer, Catherine Cavadini, Townsend Coleman, Jess Q. Harnell, and Jim Ward are relegated to extras.
We need to be vocal about the disappearance of voice actors in Hollywood. Not only for political reasons, such as pointing out Chris Pratt’s long and storied history as a right-wing homophobic ableist (which is also something that should be examined and spoken on instead of excusing him for shallow apologies and no signs of changed behavior). But also to protect an artful vocation that breathes life into our imagination rather than commodify it by Hollywood capitalists putting paychecks into the pockets of their friends just because their friends are trendy for a time. Instead of betraying long-time voice actors like Charles Martinet (who has played Mario for years), we could instead foster talent and give credit where it’s due. Especially as these voice actors have carried franchises with as much dedication as your game developers, composers, advertising team, character artists, modeling team, and the rest of your staff.
But I forgot: we’re in 2021, and if there’s anything 2020 and 2021 have reinforced for me, it’s that companies and their CEOs do not care about their staff. So if we want better conditions for any vocation, voice acting included, we have to stand up for ourselves and push the changes we want to see instead of seeing if companies will accept our demands just because we ask nicely and behave.
We need to speak up, even if we’re weird, if we’re “mean” and especially if we’re not appropriate according to corporate sensibilities.
How else will we be heard in our truth?