Voiceover Career advice for actors

Now there’s a phrase you never hear!  Usually, it is 'struggling' and sadly being chronically unemployed is a way of life for the actor.  Back in 2013, Equity’s member survey concluded that more than half of actors are under the poverty line.

  
I doubt it has improved since then.  My experience of working with actors on a daily basis tells me that the ’struggle’ is ongoing, unrelenting and in some cases affecting mental health and in most cases their general quality of life associated with financial stress.

But it does not have to be this way.

I went to drama school in the nineties and we had a ‘Voiceover Artist’ come in and give a masterclass in our second year. The only thing I really remember from it was that he proudly told us about the yacht he had purchased and the holiday villa he was about to secure using his pay-packet from a major TV campaign.  One of us (it might have been me) raised our hand to thank him at the end of the session and asked "but how do we get into it?  How do we become Voiceover Artists?".  He laughed.  Yes laughed and stated "you won’t".  Many of the drama students in that room, I included, were lucky if we could afford beans for our beans on toast.  Here was this wealthy successful VO, basically informing us, cockily I might add, that ‘Voiceover is a closed shop!’.

Looking back, at the time to some extent he was right.  Voiceover which was very much male-dominated, was a far smaller industry than it is today and the singular route to work was signing with a major Voiceover Agent.

Things have changed.  The entire landscape has been redrawn and now with the right skill set, determination, investment of time and money, YOU can have a voiceover career and as an actor, this can and should become THE PARALLEL CAREER.

Apart from the financial gain and stability from regular VO work, there are other benefits to hiding away in your cupboard under the stairs between acting jobs:

• Exercising the muscle:  Keeping you vocally fit and charged ready for auditions
• Focussing the mind:  In a very positive way to draw you out of your 'blues', achieving and succeeding in another aspect of your career instead of feeling you are failing as an actor
• Something to talk about:  ‘Well I’ve just finished a run of Romeo and Juliet this summer…..or was it last summer…I can’t remember because I’ve spent the last 6 months doing telesales!’    Replace this with ‘I’m recording a series of Audiobooks that are about to go up on Audible, I’m working with X company on their training programme and I’m developing a character for a new game…..'