Here’s a bit more detailed road map of what you can do to become a professional voice actor:
- Focus first on the process of exploring the fun and enjoyment of acting, not seeking money or fame. Agents and demos are for later.
- Determine whether you have the talent and temperament for acting by getting as much live performing experience as possible.
- “Going pro” means you must get good enough that people will pay you to do it.
- Turn on your mind, your curiosity, your capacity to create in any way you can.
- Find things you love doing and never stop doing them.
- Watch old movies & TV. Fill your inner “performer’s database” with the history of show biz.
- Focus on your health: workout, eat clean and get enough sleep.
- Read. A lot. Out loud as well as to yourself.
- Strengthen your acting ability and improv confidence with live performance experience and classes.
- Develop strong voice over skills (maintaining character, diction, reading stamina, range of accents and character, e.g.)
- It is an actor’s job is to be always ready to take advantage of opportunity and luck.
- Get a flexible side job(s). Save your money for a long haul.
- An actor should expect and plan for uncertainty, change and a long climb, no matter your experience or ability.
- When ready, move to where higher level creatives congregate to connect with them. Go to where they cast the kind of work you want to do. This is probably best done in stages, after establishing yourself in a smaller market.
- Connect with working voice actors and others heading where you want to go. Surround yourself with those who keep the positive and drop the negative.
- Honor your relationships. They are your strength and connection to what is real. Real relationships both feed and temper an actor’s ego.
- Get a life: Continually find your fuel beyond and apart from acting.
- Imagine a specific future but stay flexible. Write out your goals and revise as needed. Always affirm your goals to yourself and others out loud.
- Look inside: How do you limit yourself? What are your inner mantras? Investigate and connect with yourself and your life story. Maybe start a journal.
- Embrace mistakes, rejection and dead ends as tools for learning. Always seek an honest take on your work and yourself, even if the truth hurts. Your goals is not to avoid struggle. Your goal is to learn and improve (and have fun).
- Celebrate small victories. Reward yourself. Stay positive.
- Realize your job at an audition or gig is not to ask for something, it is to give/create something compelling and competitive. Your craft is both your validation and your superpower.
- Be ready before you interview agents. Have your marketing materials ready to impress (demo, website, etc.).
- Be so good that those who cast have to hire you– and rehire you.
- Self-direct your VO auditions only when ready and able. Otherwise, seek guidance and input with your reads.
- When ready, join an actors’ union to protect yourself, up your earnings and upgrade the quality of projects and professionalism.
- Never stop pushing your abilities past the success you establish.
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” –James Baldwin
This process may seem daunting to a beginner, but I want you to understand that the long term project of becoming a creative entrepreneur (a paid voice actor) is neither quick nor easy. If you find you enjoy performing, the ups and downs of the process can and should be fun (mostly).
Each actor’s path to their art and career is unique.
To be a professional actor, acting must be an intersection of what you love and what you are very good at. Talent or aspiration are not enough.