From The Simpsons to Bob’s Burgers, voice actors are the invisible stars of the screen

In 1987, Nancy Cartwright auditioned for The simpsons expecting to read for Lisa, Bart’s younger sister, but something about Bart jumped out at her and she asked if she could read for him instead. Usually she gave the casting directors a choice, trying out a few different voices for each role, but she knew Bart’s voice right away. Matt Groening, the show’s creator, hired her as soon as she started talking. Since, The simpsons became quite successful.

Thanks at least in part to the show’s influence, animated comedies aimed at adults are now enjoying huge success, including the release of a Bob’s Burgers movie this month. You may have heard of Eric Cartman, Peter Griffin, BoJack Horseman, Sterling Archer or Rick and Morty. But the people who express them? Probably not.

In addition to Bart, Cartwright voices Nelson, Ralph, Todd, Maggie (except for her first word, which was Elizabeth Taylor), and many more in The simpsonsmore characters in Rugrats, Pinky and the Brain and Kim possible. Her talent is clear even on Zoom as she assigns at least six different voices for storytelling purposes during our conversation.

But it’s still hard to ignore a public perception that classifies voice actors as inferior to their on-camera counterparts, as if the job is simply reading lines in a funny voice. “Does anyone realize how brilliant these voiceover actors are?” asks vocal director Ginny McSwain (Richie Rich, The Smurfs) in the 2013 documentary I know that voice. “Let’s just call them actors, because they have to get all the enigmatic expressions that you would do on camera, on the microphone.”

“At one point, I think there was a stigma,” Cartwright says. “There was kind of a view that actors wanted to supplement their income by being voice actors, not really giving full credit to those who chose to pursue a career as a voice-over actor. It lasted a long time. »

Television voice actors have rarely broken onto the big screen. In 1983 Cartwright appeared in Twilight Zone: The Movie, in which a malevolent boy holds a family hostage using psychokinetic powers. In a moment of prodigious symbolism, her character, Ethel, is trapped inside a television and eaten by a cartoon monster. Then came his turn in 1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit, like a squeaky comic book shoe that’s plunged into a vat of acid by Christopher Lloyd’s villain Judge Doom. It is curiously heartbreaking.

But The simpsons gradually took over, starting life as a short segment on The Tracey Ullman Show. Cartwright and her co-stars Dan Castellaneta (Homer), Yeardley Smith (Lisa) and Julie Kavner (Marge) crammed into a carpeted-wall sound room and shared a microphone. They were paid less than the other performers on the show until they threatened to go on strike. According to the most recent figures, The Simpsons cast members now receive $300,000 per episode.

“In addition to the great performers we have on The simpsonsthere are guys that aren’t last names,” Cartwright adds, before rolling out a list that includes his former mentor Daws Butler (Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Yogi Bear), Lorenzo Music (Garfield) and Billy West (Futurama).

Probably the closest thing to a household name in the voice acting is Mel Blanc, who played Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Woody Woodpecker and a thousand others. But even he suffered indignities. In the late 1930s, Blanc got his first feature film role as Gideon the Cat in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio. He recorded hundreds of lines, but at the last minute the producers decided to mute Gideon. Blanc was virtually removed from the film, with only a gasp from his voice in the final cut. He is not credited.

Almost a century later, the fate of the voice actor is a similar story. Among the most recognizable stamps on television today is that of H Jon Benjamin, who voices the main characters in both Bob’s Burgers and Archer, two animated sitcoms that have spanned the past decade, with over 300 episodes between them. Yet when Benjamin appeared in the hit 2014 comedy 22 jump streetplaying a hapless American football coach in some of his biggest scenes, his name was missing from the film’s credits.

Benjamin’s voiceover success speaks for itself, but the nature of his talent is harder to pin down. Unlike Cartwright, he performs his most famous roles using his usual voice. In his memoirs Failure is an optionhe questions what you need to become a voice actor: “I usually say the best way to move forward is to find another job and hopefully someone will produce an animated show nearby and that he will ask you to make a voice.”

Among his most obvious skills is improvisation, key to the appeal of Bob’s Burgers, in which Bob, the irresponsible, neckless burger seller, and his wife Linda raise three precocious children on a street plagued by botched burglaries and animatronic sharks. Benjamin rarely even reads the scripts. “When you do an episode, you read it cold,” he says on Zoom. “Then you immediately start playing with it.”

He uses the same voice in Archer. While Bob is a jaded fall guy, Sterling Archer is a dapper secret agent, roaming the planet in a cashmere turtleneck, defeating supervillains and beating half the world’s women, while his co-workers sniff each other out. MSG. With Bob’s Burgers movie information this month, we are also talking about a Archer film. “I would love that,” Benjamin says. “They also talked about making a live action movie of Archer, in which case I might not like it as much, because I don’t think I’ll get the role . . . It would be like throwing myself into the role of James Bond. I don’t think anyone would do that.

Dubbing has its advantages. Cartwright recalls auditioning for on-camera roles in his early twenties, mentioning “how long it took to sit on a set, how much preparation it took, memorizing the lines. . . I had a little anxiety about it. It wasn’t that fun.

“It’s the same as acting, it’s just that you don’t have to get up at six in the morning,” says Jess Harnell (Animaniacs, Crash Bandicoot, Transformers) in I know that voice.

There’s also the relative anonymity that voice actors enjoy while their live counterparts are mobbed in the street. Benjamin says his voice is recognized “rarely,” but more often when wearing a mask during the pandemic. “People are going to ask, ‘Are you the one playing Bob?’ Half the time I’ll say yes. Sometimes he lies. “If I’m busy or something. Which is very infrequent. I’m not that busy.”

Cartwright notes that The simpsons was one of the few shows that did not halt production during the pandemic. “When Covid hit, everything stopped, except for the animation,” she smiles. “Everybody wants to do animation now.”

‘The Bob’s Burgers Movie’ is in cinemas from May 27