Why A Good Voice Actor Never Blames The Script

“The gaffer was distracting me!”

“I ate too much pasta at lunch!”

“I can’t do three things at once!”

When things go wrong, we actors can be highly creative when looking to deflect the blame. It’s perhaps unsurprising that, in a profession that demands almost delusional levels of self-belief, actors are often unwilling to accept that maybe the problem with the performance is them.

This tendency to look for excuses is not limited to stage and screen either. Voice actors have occasionally been known to look elsewhere for explanations when they struggle to deliver. And before you decide I’m having fun at my peers’ expense; I freely admit that I have sometimes blamed the odd inanimate object for my own limitations.

A few years ago, I was struggling with a challenging video games script. Try as I might I just couldn’t find a way into the character. As things got more embarrassing, I started instinctively looking for issues that could be the cause. And while there was a little voice in my head saying, “admit it mate, you’ve just run out of talent”, I couldn’t resist declaring the lack of a stand for my script as the reason I was so inhibited!

I like to think I’ve grown up a little since then…

There is one excuse that I have always tried hard to avoid. It’s insidious and often grossly unfair. But even on the occasions that it isn’t, I believe this actor’s excuse to be one that is just inexcusable:

“It wasn’t me it was the script.”

I hear it a lot. Only the other day I was on one of those marvellous Facebook forums for voice overs and I heard a fellow audiobook narrator say:

“It must be easy for you, having the pick of the good titles. Those of us who have to narrate the badly written stuff have to really struggle.”

This statement got me thinking about the fundamental point of the actor’s job. We get given a script, usually receive a little direction and then we have to make it work! However, tongue twisting or nonsensical the dialogue we have to find some truth. We have to interpret and then convey the intentions of the writer.

Sometimes it’s joyously easy, sometimes not. But as an actor, you’re not paid to find fault in the writing and hide behind that fault. You’re paid to communicate all the emotions and ideas that are swirling around the authors mind. And you’re paid to do a good job…

In an audiobook it’s the narrators voice that people hear, and that voice becomes entwined with the writers. If the narrator does a shoddy job, I doubt many listeners will sagely observe:

“It was terrible, but I could tell that it wasn’t the narrator’s fault. The script was clearly awful.”

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