VAM 234 | Interview with Jim Meskimen, Part 1
Welcome to episode 234 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 first part of my interview with the master of impressions, the uncanny and super talented, Jim Meskimen! Jim is probably best known for his ability to impersonate all sorts of famous people, including Robin Williams, Patrick Stewart, Tommy Lee Jones, Robert DeNiro, and George W. Bush. He’s been featured in YouTube videos as well as having been a contestant on America’s Got Talent! While Jim’s impressions are legendary, that’s only one of the well-honed tools he has in his acting toolbox. He’s also an accomplished actor in his own right appearing in films like Apollo 13, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Frost/Nixon. He’s played characters in TV shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Hunters, and Landman. As a voice actor, you may have heard him as Ron Howard in Family Guy, Ultron in Avengers Assemble, as well as Bataar, Daw, and Avatar Kuruk in Avatar the Last Airbender. Some of his game credits include Mr. Helpful in Five Nights at Freddy’s, Edwin Odesseiron in the first and second versions of Baldur’s Gate, and Thranduil in Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II. He’s also been hired by Disney to voice match a number of their characters for different projects including the Genie from Aladdin and Merlin from The Sword and the Stone!
In this episode, I begin by asking Jim how he got started as a performer. Jim’s parents were both professional actors, working hard, doing their best to book roles and make ends meet. His father left the industry, and his parents separated, but his mother continued to pursue her acting career and eventually was cast in the hit show Happy Days as Mrs. Cunningham, the mother of the main character, Richie Cunningham. This was a transformative event for Jim’s family! Not only was his mother suddenly famous, but they were also much better off financially. Jim was able to observe the progression of his mother’s acting career, from early struggles to later success, and it helped him gain perspective on what it truly meant to be a working actor.
Ironically, Jim wasn’t that interested in acting when he was younger. He initially wanted to be a visual artist and studied drawing and painting all through school. He spent some of his college time in Madrid, Spain, studying painting with a famous artist there. It was during his time abroad that Jim had two revelations. The first was that the life of a painter was too solitary for his tastes. He wanted to pursue a career that allowed him to be more social. The second was that he ran into the famous actor Harvey Keitel on the streets of Madrid. Harvey was shooting a film there and Jim decided to go up to him and ask him some questions about acting. Harvey was kind enough to chat with Jim, and when they parted, Jim realized he was more excited discussing acting with Harvey than he had ever felt talking to visual artists about painting.
In that moment, Jim made the decision to pursue acting, and within 2 months, he arrived in New York to begin his acting journey. He got a job working as a character designer for secondary characters on the famous Rankin-Bass animated show, Thundercats, and used that income to help support himself financially as he did theater and improv. It didn’t take long before he was able to support himself with his acting work, especially when he started booking commercials. After 10 years as a professional performer in the Big Apple, he moved to LA to pursue on-camera work, as well as continue his work in voice over. Jim’s ability to do impressions was a special skill that helped him get the attention of casting directors all over town. However, he also made sure to develop his improv and acting abilities to a professionally competitive level so that he was marketable as an actor, regardless of whether or not he was impersonating someone else!
I’m eager to share Jim’s story with you, but before I do, I need to make one quick disclaimer. During this interview, Jim references a book that he found helpful early on in his career, Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard. While I know that Jim appreciates this book, I also need to mention that it’s a foundational text for a religious organization. It’s our policy here at Voice Acting Mastery that we do not officially endorse any religious organization and that any mention of the book in this podcast should not be interpreted as an endorsement. Thanks for your understanding.
And with that out of the way, we can now dive into Jim’s interview and appreciate his many insights.
VAM 233 | Interview with Ben Diskin, Part 2
Welcome to episode 233 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 eager to share with you the second part of my interview with the multi-talented and Emmy award winning voice actor, Ben Diskin! You may know his work from animated shows like Hey Arnold!, Codename: Kids Next Door, Spectacular Spider-Man, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H., and the Muppet Babies! You may also recognize his voice in games like Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, the Kingdom Hearts series of games, and Date Everything! You may even have heard him in anime shows like Blood+, Naruto Shippuden, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, and Aggretsuko.
In the previous episode, Ben and I explored in detail how he got started as a voice actor. Ben was effectively offered agent representation before he was even born and was acting in commercials at the ripe old age of 3! Since his parents were both actors, they were able to help guide him through the industry, both artistically and professionally. They knew what it took to be believable on-camera, and they had a realistic understanding of the demands of pursuing an acting career.
Ben was exposed to both the joys of acting, and the possible negative ramifications of being a performer at a very early age. He was often typecast, which he found artistically limiting, and he also had to deal with negative feedback from his classmates at school, who assumed he was far more rich and famous than he actually was. All of this contributed to Ben’s desire to pursue voice acting, instead of on-camera acting, as a way to not only escape the typecasting trap, but also to be able to keep his private life and his professional life more separate. As a voice actor, he could act, and still keep his anonymity in everyday life.
While all of that might help explain why Ben left the on-camera world to pursue voice acting instead, I was still curious as to why he wanted to be a performer in the first place? Did he just start at such an early age that it seemed natural? Did he feel like he didn’t have any other choice? Ben answers me quite bluntly: he thinks that he’s an incredibly boring person, and so any opportunity he had to role play as someone else was appealing to him!
As my regular listeners might realize, this surprising answer does seem to contradict many of the ideas I’ve shared on the podcast about an actor valuing themselves and their inner universe of possibilities. So Ben and I dive deep into this subject to see if we can discover if there’s any way to reconcile his approach to acting, and my ideas about the acting process. We get very specific about how he thinks about characters, and what exactly he does to embody them, especially when he’s given very little information on which to base his acting choices.
Since Ben started acting when he was so young, it can be challenging for him to articulate his process. Nevertheless, I encourage you to listen closely to our conversation as I help tease out exactly why Ben got so good at voice acting. You’ll notice in his answers some familiar themes from earlier episodes: he watches a ton of media to understand the different styles of shows, he closely analyzes performances he admires in order to be able to reproduce them himself, he studies his fellow professional colleagues to see what he can learn from them, and he makes sure to physicalize his characters as much as possible. Ben has internalized the fundamentals of voice acting through immersion, intense focus, and repeated practice. Hopefully his story will inspire my listeners to do the same!
VAM 232 | Interview with Ben Diskin, Part 1
Welcome to episode 232 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 multi-talented and Emmy award winning voice actor, Ben Diskin! You may be familiar with his voice acting work in animation including Eugene in Hey Arnold!, Numbuh 1 and Numbuh 2 in Codename: Kids Next Door, Eddie Brock and Venom in Spectacular Spider-Man, Keldor/Skeletor in He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Skaar, Bulldozer, Fandral and Miek in Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H., and both Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat in Muppet Babies for which he won a Daytime Emmy award! In games you may have heard him as Glenn Lodbrok in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, Young Xehanort in the Kingdom Hearts series of games, and Franklin Lieste in Date Everything! Some of his anime roles include Kai in Blood+, Sai Yamanaka in Naruto Shippuden, Char Aznable in Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, and Haida in Aggretsuko.
In the first part of our discussion, Ben shares with me how he got started as an actor. As crazy at it might sound, for all intents and purposes, Ben was signed to his first acting agent in utero! His parents were both actors in Los Angeles, and when his mother was pregnant with him, her agent offered to represent Ben once he was born. As a baby, Ben started getting cast in commercials and other acting roles on-camera. It certainly helped that both his parents could not only coach him on his performances, but that they also had a realistic understanding of the challenges of pursuing an acting career. Unlike some stage parents, they didn’t need Ben to become a big star, they were just happy if he was enjoying himself. Any money he might make they planned to save for his college fund.
Little did they know that Ben would not only enjoy acting, he would became passionate about it. Acting was so important to him that even as a young child, he was willing to put up with the tedium one regularly experiences on a live-action set. Shooting actors on film can be a slow and laborious process. Often you have to arrive very early to be put through hair and makeup even though you may just end up sitting around for hours after that, waiting to be called to perform your one scene. You can imagine how frustrating this might be to a young person, but Ben was so eager to act that he was willing to endure it as long as he got his chance to play pretend.
In fact, Ben was so committed to the process of acting, that he soon felt frustrated as producers began to typecast him. He was hungry to play all sorts of different characters, not just the slightly nerdy kids he was often hired to portray on screen. He discovered that voice acting could offer him the opportunity to play a wide range of roles, and he need only be limited by his ability to act, and the sound of his voice, rather than by his physical appearance. He quickly set about expanding his vocal range so he could play as many characters as possible.
One of the things I find most interesting about Ben’s journey is that he experienced both the highs and the lows of acting at such an early age. For example, his young psyche had to come to grips with how being famous might affect his relationships with his peers. Early in our time together, Ben shares with me his story about letting his friends on the playground know that he had been cast in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, Kindergarten Cop, and how through a series of misunderstandings, this actually damaged some of his friendships. He also shares with me an experience he had with a casting director who told him to his face to stop trying to play characters outside of where he was normally typecast. This experience made him so frustrated, that he resolved to find a way to prove that close-minded casting director wrong, by booking as many different types of characters as his vocal instrument would allow.
The pivotal mindset that supported Ben in the midst of these challenges was that he was fascinated with being an actor who could express things that were original and meaningful, and he cared very little about getting attention or approval from others. He was truly living the advice that I often repeat on this podcast, “Love the art in yourself more than yourself in the art”. I hope Ben’s story and his deep commitment to acting inspire all of you in the audience to do the same!
VAM 229 | How Voice Acting Culture Lost Its Way, And How Reclaiming Its Heritage Can Benefit You
Welcome to episode 229 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 want to take this episode to talk about a cultural shift that I’ve noticed in the voice acting world, especially amongst younger, more aspiring voice actors. It’s a shift away from the more traditional approach to acting as a form of artistry that deserves attention and devotion for its own sake, and a shift towards acting simply as a means to an end. Whether that end is getting yourself into projects because you’re a fan of animation and video games, or if that end values getting more personal attention as an influencer online, this disconnect from acting for its own sake is not really serving anyone in a sustainable way.
In the past, I’ve talked about the difference between how a fan approaches the professional voice acting world, and how a creator approaches that same environment. I’m sure my regular listeners are familiar with a piece of advice that I often give which is, “Love the art in yourself more than yourself in the art.”. It’s a slight rewording of the advice that the famous acting teacher Stanislavski gave to his students. I’ve actually explored this topic at length way back in episode 44 of the podcast entitled, “Do You Think Like an Artist?” where I expound on that Stanislavski quote in detail. I also touched on the subject in episode 218 entitled, “It’s Not About You: An Actor’s True Purpose Is To Serve The Art, Not To Become A Celebrity.”. In those episodes and others I’ve consistently emphasized that voice acting mastery comes from devotion to the art of acting first and foremost, and many of the voice actors I’ve interviewed on this podcast can confirm this. They’ve spent an enormous amount of time collaborating with other artists in focused acting environments in order for them to develop believable and authentic acting skills.
However, things have changed quite a bit since I first started voice acting. One of the biggest changes I’ve noticed is in my students. When I first began teaching voice acting classes in 2009, many of my students came from more traditional acting backgrounds, like theater or improv. These students might have participated in theater in school, or studied acting on camera. They usually had some experience collaborating with directors, writers, and other actors, and they brought that experience with them into my voice acting classes. What drew them to voice acting was often an appreciation for animation and video games, but they were an actor first, and a fan second.
That’s no longer the case today. At the time of the recording of this episode, the majority of voice acting students I encounter have almost no acting experience whatsoever. Not only have they never been in a traditional acting environment, more and more they seem to lack exposure to certain influential movies or TV shows where they can study some of the best performances out there. What makes things even more challenging is that many of them have been heavily marketed to by online salespeople who insist that voice acting is easy, and that all you need is a microphone and a spare closet and you too can get paid to speak words without knowing anything about acting. What inevitably follows is that a significant number of these students end up frustrated that they are not booking jobs as easily as they expected. This is because many of them are approaching this very challenging profession completely backwards, coming at it from influencer culture or fan culture rather than acting culture. This leaves many aspiring voice actors misinformed and lacking the context they need to succeed both artistically and professionally. A voice acting culture disconnected from a traditional acting culture is not a healthy one.
I want to address this disconnect in the current voice acting world by sharing my observations about how things have gotten this way over the years, and to remind my listeners that not only was it not always this way, but that we as actors have the power to reconnect with what we’ve lost. If any of my listeners out there have grown up in the current toxic soup of online anxiety, ever-shortening trend cycles, and the constant pressure to chase relevance and clout, I want to offer you some hope that you don’t need to feel this way forever. There is a different path. I believe that if I can provide some historical context and share what it was like before these current unhealthy trends took hold, I can help my listeners improve their artistry along with their resilience. A simple mindset shift can recalibrate your priorities and your expectations, which can help with any frustrations you might be experiencing, especially if voice acting is proving to be a bit more challenging than the online salespeople might have promised. In fact, I believe that the more of us who adopt a more traditional artistic mindset, the more we all stand to benefit, both as creative collaborators who get to work on better and better projects, but also as audience members who get to enjoy more nuanced and authentic performances in our entertainment.
So if you’ve been feeling stuck or confused in your voice acting journey, or if things aren’t going as smoothly or as quickly as you’d like, then allow me to help explain why embracing a traditional acting culture can be so beneficial for you.
VAM 228 | How The Power Of Silence Can Help You Become A Better Creator
Welcome to episode 228 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
In previous episodes of this podcast, I’ve stressed how important it is for my listeners to become familiar with some of the best acting performances out there. In episode 204, I encouraged you all to go hunting for the best acting and storytelling you can find, especially in genres and forms of media that you might otherwise not have considered before. Way back in episode 105 of the podcast entitled, Know Your Genre: Better Voice Acting Through Immersion, I explained how crucial it was for an actor to familiarize themselves with the most popular and influential stories in media. And in my most recent interview with Alejandra Reynoso, she shared how she had the opportunity to experience some of the best films in existence because her father worked as a projectionist at movie theaters in Los Angeles. She spent much of her youth watching and enjoying a variety of films with her father.
I’ve also suggested that my listeners do their best to consume quality entertainment because it is far too easy to allow the algorithms of social media and platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and even Netflix to decide for us what we should watch next. The algorithm chooses media based on what it thinks we want. It gives us more of what we’ve chosen to consume in the past, but it has no conception of what we might need to experience as artists in order to grow, nor does it care. It’s only job is to monetize our attention, which is why in episode 221 I talked about the value of serendipity and how useful it can be for you to break your habitual patterns of media consumption in order to expose yourself to new and inspiring types of art.
In all of the episodes I’ve mentioned and more, I’ve focused on helping my listeners to consume the best, most artistically nourishing media that exists. However, for this episode, I want to do something very different. I want to encourage you not to consume more media, but rather to find moments in your life where you actually seek out and embrace silence. While it is definitely important to build your knowledge of characters, stories, and exceptional acting performances, it turns out it is equally important to find quiet, introspective time to allow all of that knowledge to consolidate in your subconscious so it can inform your choices and your instincts as an artist.
Without that silence, your creative mind cannot engage, it can only imitate and regurgitate what it’s seen before. If you are doing nothing but consuming a veritable firehose of media and you never take the time to listen to your own internal creative spark, you risk never creating anything that isn’t just a copy of what’s come before. This inner wisdom is exactly what differentiates the human mind from the current Large Language Models that power what is spuriously referred to as Artificial Intelligence. AI as we call it today is extremely good at consuming media and regurgitating it somewhat accurately. It can remix the sources it’s trained on and deliver relatively polished results. I’m not sure I’d call that intelligence per se, but many people do find the results impressive. What AI lacks, however, is the power to truly innovate. AI is incapable of being introspectively silent and listening to the quiet voice of inspiration that has fueled some of the greatest artists on the planet.
In this episode, I want to impress upon you just how valuable it can be to sit in silence, even if it feels uncomfortable at first. Our subconscious creative power resides in that silence, and it can only be heard if we take the time to get quiet, be still, and listen to what it has to say. So if you’re ready, I invite you to join me for an exploration of silence and what it has to offer us as artists and performers.
VAM 221 | Breaking Behavior Patterns – How Serendipity Makes You A Better Actor
Welcome to episode 221 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
In this episode, I’d like to expand on some of the ideas I explored at the end of the previous episode, Part 2 of my interview with Jamieson Price. If you haven’t listened to it already, I would suggest you check out both parts of his interview, as well as episode 204 of the podcast entitled, “Go Hunting for the Best Acting and Storytelling”. While those episodes are not required for you to appreciate this one, they can offer you important context for the concepts I’m going to address here.
One of the big pieces of advice that Jamieson gives to his acting students is to go out and live life. In the previous episode, I defined “living life” as maximizing the interactions you have with other human beings by participating in their emotional lives as well as engaging with their ideological beliefs. These life experiences are what an artist draws upon in order to bring authenticity and believability to their artistic creations. Having diverse and enriching life experiences can help broaden your expressive capabilities as a creative in any field.
In the past, living life usually meant getting out of your house and interacting with people and with the world around you. The further away from home you got, the more likely it would be for you to have new and unique experiences that you hadn’t encountered before. It was as if reality was a random experience generator that increased in novelty the more you explored it, like opening up new areas on a map in a video game.
While this can still be the case, a new factor has been added to modern life, the world of online algorithms. Platforms like social media sites and even media streaming services like Netflix, YouTube, or Spotify, analyze your behavior online and try to guess what you might like next based on your clicks, likes, comments, watch time and other points of data. The ultimate goal of these platforms is to keep you engaged with them in order to fully monetize your attention. It’s even been revealed that certain dating apps can employ algorithms whose goal is not always to find you the perfect match, but instead to provide slight mismatches so that you’ll stay engaged with their platform longer, as you continue to look for a more satisfying romantic partner. The financial pressure on these algorithms to curate your experiences so that you won’t leave their respective platforms is immense.
These algorithms also affect real life interactions and shape society in ways we still don’t fully understand. Social media sites can affect not only who we believe we are and who we choose to interact with both online and in real life, but also how we behave when interacting with them. Online algorithms have changed dating and relationships, and also how we relate to family, friends, and perceived foes. We form opinions based on repeated impressions gathered from social media, and algorithms influence the frequency of exposure to certain mindsets. We may believe or disbelieve anything we see online, which then can affect our behavior not only socially, but politically as well. Online interactions can and often do set the tone for in-person interactions. The online world and the real world are no longer separate territories. They overlap constantly and cross-pollinate, in an ever-shortening news cycle of action and reaction, feeding off one another and often spiraling into absurdity. It’s a constant challenge just to maintain one’s equilibrium in the online battle for our attention spans and engagement.
As our lives are managed more and more by algorithms tuned to maximize this engagement, randomness in our everyday interactions is greatly reduced. The algorithm wants to give us something just slightly different from what we had before, but not too different or it risks losing our attention. It wants to keep us on its treadmill so it can make money off of us, and this diminishes the possibility of truly random experiences.
I want to suggest that it’s time to add some randomness back into our lives, both as artists, and as human beings! One of the best ways to do this is to break out of your habitual patterns of behavior. We can become so lulled into submission by the algorithms that provide us with entertainment and other inputs, that we can lose the personal impetus to reach for something new and different. One way to break this pattern of hypnosis is to make a decision that is completely the opposite of what you would normally choose. Do you always go left at a certain intersection? Why not go right this time, and find out what’s down that street you always skip? Do you always pick the same thing off the menu at a certain restaurant? Why not choose something radically different this time, and see what you think? Have you always watched or listened to a certain show, piece of music, or even the same podcast you always go to? Why not explore the kind of entertainment that you might normally ignore or even avoid? What would be the harm in that? If you try an episode of a show that is completely foreign to you, and you don’t like it, you don’t have to keep watching it, but if something in it does intrigue you, you may develop an appreciation for something the algorithm would never have chosen for you, if you hadn’t decided to be different on purpose.
Breaking your habitual patterns of behavior brings an important element back into your life, and it’s called “serendipity”. The serendipitous experience is the one that you were not expecting, and never could’ve planned for, but somehow turns out to be extremely enlightening or beneficial in some way. Our online algorithms tend to limit the chances for a true serendipitous experience, and I’m going to take this episode to explain why I think breaking out of your habitual patterns, and inviting serendipity back into your life is so very important for you at this time, both as a person and as an artist.