Ladies Doing Boy Voices

Last week for me was a more creative one than usual. (Yay!)

I auditioned for a role in a radio drama. The role was a middle-aged woman with a “larger than life” personality. I sent through a few takes, which I thought were pretty good. I’m a 38-year-old woman, so, you know, “middle-aged woman” isn’t too much of a stretch, and I had fun with the “larger than life”. Always fun to have a bit of a play.

The director sent me a surprising reply. He wasn’t giving me the role I auditioned for. No, that wasn’t surprising. If you’re an actor, voiceover artist, or any other kind of creative, you probably know there are far more rejections than roles! However, there was something he liked in my audition and he wanted me to try the role of a 9-year-old boy instead.

Yep – something in my middle-aged-woman voice made him think I’d be great for his 9-year-old boy character. Okay!

Well, I’ve never played a young boy before; have not even tried, to be honest. But you know what they say – no time like the present! Time to learn something new.

I tried listening to demos of young voiceover artists… you know… actual boys with actual boy voices… but it was hard to capture the sound. I couldn’t imitate them. My voice kept going too high-pitched and sounding like a young girl instead.

Then I thought well, there are some super talented voiceover women out there playing the roles of young boys. What do they do?

I googled Nancy Cartwright and Debi Derryberry – the first names that came to mind - and listened to their boy voices. Strangely enough, they were much easier to imitate. I spent some time listening and imitating until I got a sense of where to place the resonance of the voice, what pitches to try and how to make the word formation a little immature.

I tried a few takes – my boy's voice ended up kind of mid-range in pitch, quite nasal and very front-of-the-mouth with an American accent. And the director loved it. It was only a few lines, and I'll let you know when you can hear it.

So, apart from me just having a little boast about how I did a new thing and did it fabulously, I thought why not have a little round of virtual applause for the amazing voiceover ladies who do boy voices on the regular?

Nancy Cartwright has been voicing Bart Simpson for over THIRTY YEARS. I think that is some mad talent right there. She also voices and acts in a bunch of other stuff, including Chucky from Rugrats, which is fantastic because a person surely can’t be only Bart Simpson for 30 years, can they?

Debi Derryberry is the voice of Jimmy Neutron, how cool is that? And a whole lot of other fun characters in F is for Family, Sailor Moon, Crash Bandicoot, Monster High… Also, she has some fabulous animal-character demos on her website (go listen!), AND she is super fun to follow on Instagram.

Lisa Biggs voices Charlie Brown in the Peanuts franchise, I’m kinda smitten. As well as many other animated characters, Lisa provides voices for kids’ toys (of course KIDS’ toys, did I need to specify that, are there any adult toys with voices? Wait, don’t answer.) Lisa is also a voice coach and specifically teaches courses on voice acting for boy voices. Yay!

Masako Nozawa was the voice of Astro Boy and also voices Goku and other characters in, like, a billion Dragon Ball Z episodes, movies and specials. She has been working in anime since 1963! How fabulous is she?

These are just some women I could think of off the top of my head. I’m getting a little carried away with the googling and fangirling, so over to you…. Which amazing ladies doing boy voices do you love? I would love to hear about your favourite voice actresses. Give me someone new to check out!

Author: Sumara Meers - sumarameers.com