One of my favorite jokes to tell in a workshop — you know the part where everyone goes around the room and says their name and how they got into voice acting? Here’s mine:
I got into this industry pretty much like everybody else. I was a military intelligence officer in the United States Air Force. Then I worked at a few three-letter government agencies in counterterrorism. And then one day, suddenly, I became a voice actor.
Your typical career path. Right?
The origin story
So what did that origin story actually look like? How did I go from a job with absolutely nothing to do with creativity to a full-time voice actor in about a year?
Here’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t jump into coaching. I didn’t jump into workshops. I didn’t move to Los Angeles — in fact, I was in Virginia, which can hardly be called the creative hub of America. And I didn’t go buy $5,000 professional demos.
Here’s what I did do. I grabbed a microphone worth about $67 that I’d won in a music composition contest a year and a half earlier. (Side note: that same microphone is one a student of mine recently booked a $5,000 job on.) I jumped onto a casting website a friend recommended. And I started.
That was it. Nobody asked me for permission. There was no laundry list of things to finish before I was allowed behind the mic, and nobody was standing around telling me how it had always been done. I didn’t know — and frankly, I didn’t care. It was something I tried on a whim one Saturday while I was still in the reserves.
Honestly, that was liberating. Because if I’d listened to the conventional wisdom at the time, I never would have had the confidence to get behind the microphone and start auditioning. This is what happens when you try to force a traditional Hollywood model onto an industry that barely exists there in isolation anymore. I went full-time while I was still in Virginia. The only reason I ever moved to LA was to chase one very particular kind of work.
What the military taught me
Here’s something I learned as a military officer: my job was to achieve an objective. I had clearly delineated expectations, a clearly delineated skillset, and I knew that if I didn’t meet those expectations, the objective didn’t get completed.
Being able to apply that kind of discipline to an artistic endeavor was invaluable, and I credit it for a lot of my early success. I could take what we used to call a fuzzy objective and turn it into a series of actionable steps. I could look at the battlefield that was my career and war-game where the pieces needed to be. If I knew I had to get ten auditions done, I got ten auditions done. I showed up on time to everything — and was genuinely aghast that directors and casting folks were surprised I was punctual.
I came into a world of artists and didn’t behave like an artist.
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What the military cost me
On the flip side, this transition also taught me that I needed to relearn how to play.
One of the disadvantages of military experience is that you’re used to the stakes being extremely high — your decisions literally affect life and death. So while there’s room to think outside the box, we have doctrine for a reason. That led me to play my reads, my acting, very safe for a very long time. Unlearning it took some self-discovery, some self-confidence, a little therapy, and the community I immersed myself in once I’d established myself as a voice actor.
As much as I say you don’t have to be in Los Angeles to be a voice actor — it is a creative hub, and it’s where I found people on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from me. They were creative, free, and very woo-woo. I was disciplined, objective-focused, and analytical. And they taught me something important: you can’t do this alone. Just like in the military, I needed a whole group of people around me to achieve the objective. As an actor, I needed people around me to help me find new ways to solve the problem.
Voice actors are extremely isolated. We live in a five-by-five room most of the time and rarely interact with other people. I was starved for the kind of collaborative environment I’d had in the Air Force and in government service. Very different outcome — but I needed it just the same.
There are no rules
If this story doesn’t prove to you that you can become a voice actor no matter what you’re doing right now, I don’t know what will.
Yes, the military helped me. Yes, I had savings from a successful prior career. Yes, the life-and- death stakes of being an officer helped me put things in perspective and approach the mic with confidence. But nobody can claim military-to-actor is a common path.
So no matter who you are — a veterinarian, an IT professional, a graphic designer, whatever — there’s a path here for you. All you have to do is make the conscious choice to walk it. Remember that you are the best and most passionate advocate for your own career. No one can tell you exactly how to build it. No one can hand you the rules. There are no rules.
This is a wishy-washy creative discipline full of success and failure and joy and tears and rejection. I won’t pretend I haven’t had hard days. I have, and I’m sure there are more in front of me. But I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.
No matter where you’re starting from, the first step is the same — and you don’t have to figure it out alone. I run a free masterclass that walks through how to actually start building a voice acting career, no experience required. It’s completely free. Register for the free masterclass here.