How to Stand Out in Voice Acting with Casting Director Stephanie Sheh

The list of successful casting directors who are also successful actors is exceedingly short. There might even just be a single name on it, and that name is Stephanie Sheh. One of the top voice actors in animation, she has nearly 700 credits to her name, and that’s just as a performer. She’s also a writer, producer, director, and obviously, a casting director, having put together several dozen projects on that side of the camera.

She’s still heavily involved in anime, but she’s hardly limited to that. She’s also worked on Star Wars and Disney projects, and is constantly in demand. One of her latest projects is Disney’s Twisted-Wonderland: The Animation, the first season of which is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu. She talked to us from Los Angeles.

Key Insights

A strong foundation in acting technique is essential for voice actors who want to deliver meaningful, professional performances.

Making clear, creative choices helps actors avoid “vanilla” auditions and stand out in highly competitive casting pools.

Long-term success often comes from niche expertise, consistent networking, and understanding both sides of the industry.

What got you into acting in the first place? I’m assuming the acting came first and then the casting?

Yeah, the acting came first. I mostly get hired to do voice-over. It doesn’t mean that that’s all I do as an actor, but it’s what I’ve basically been hired for. I’m so grateful, but all actors want to do the things that you’re not doing.

So when I started out, if you want to really get into it psychologically, when I was very young, the appeal of acting was an escape from myself. At the time, I don’t think I was very happy with who I was as a human, so that’s where that came from.

So how did that evolve to so much success in voice acting?

For whatever reason, voice-over was what I was hired to do, over and over again. I can speculate in terms of why that is. The worst feedback I got was from an agent.

I read for her, too, and she said, “I don’t have any issue with your ability to read, but I’m not signing you because I don’t know where I would put you. Because from the neck up, you look 30, and from the body down, you look 14.”

Oh my God, that’s awful!

(Laughs) It was terrible. And at the time, FYI, I was 24, so it was doubly bad. Like, “I’m 30? What are you talking about?” (Laughs) It was brutal. And over the years, I got it over and over again, that it was a really great read, but I’m just not physically right for this part. So I started with voice acting in the niche of dubbing anime.

I’ve heard that from other people, doing English dubbing being their way in.

Yeah, but at the time I started, it was very rare. Nowadays, a lot of people come in through fandom, but at the time, I was already pursuing acting in college, doing improv, part of a Shakespeare group and whatnot, and I was watching anime.

I would watch the Japanese version and then the English version, and as an actor with low self esteem, I thought to myself, “Well, if that’s the bar, I can do that. Right?” (Laughs) I had the confidence, whether or not it was warranted, so I pursued it.

It was such a small niche market, and being Asian, even though I’m not Japanese, there are some cultural elements that I can pick up on a little bit more naturally, because it’s not so foreign to me. So I’d come in with a leg up, because I would know archetypes, I would know tropes. At that time, there weren’t that many actors who were fans of anime, so I had that base knowledge and an advantage.

Did that lead to other opportunities?

I’d been doing anime for a while, but hadn’t been doing as much of the original animation and that sphere. At some point, I started booking. There were a lot of things happening, a lot of pro-Asian casting that also helped, because there were a lot more characters that were Asian, and more representation happening at the same time.

I started noticing that I would book some parts, and there would be people in the room who already knew who I was, which was very confusing to me, because I’d never been a household name. What I realized is that I had been working in the industry long enough that the people who grew up watching anime were now working in the industry, so they knew who I was. (Laughs)

That is fantastic.

I remember this one experience where we had done this movie called Your Name., which was a big deal in the anime space. I went in for a callback at Nickelodeon and the director who I had never met in person.

When I walked into the room, swiveled in his chair, and he goes, “Your name?” I’m like, “Oh, Stephanie Sheh.” And he goes, “No! The movie! Oh my gosh, so great.” (Laughs)

So, when did casting come into it?

Even before I started doing it professionally, I was the type of person who pays attention to casting, even as an audience member. But it was a slow situation. I never started out trying to pursue that as a career, I had just done so much networking as an actor, and when I was pursuing acting in the anime world, my day job was also producing anime, so I was already on both sides of it.

I would go to events, conferences, conventions, hang out with the producers and the studio owners, but then also had my actor friends. So because I ended up knowing a lot of people, people just started asking me for recommendations.

So it came about organically?

Yeah, I pretty much exclusively work with NYAV POST when it comes to casting and directing, mostly because they give me so much creative freedom, and I value that beyond anything else. Eventually it became more of an official thing.

How have the two sides of your career affected each other?

I always say knowing what goes with other people’s hardships and challenges can only make you better. I very much view any sort of production as a team effort, and in production, it’s a series of fires that need to be creatively put out.

So if you come from that perspective, you can tweak yourself to make things as easy as possible. I think that applies to every position. I think that one of the things I learned as a producer early on, and one of the things that helped my acting early on is, as a producer, I sat in on every single session so I could observe and learn from every actor who went in.

As a casting person and an actor, that’s the same thing, because you’re listening to thousands of auditions, and you can hear the process, hear what’s being phoned in, what choices are being made, and also acknowledge and realize someone might be a good actor, but not right for the character.

I think that’s pretty common for casting directors.

Things are so fast paced these days. Twenty years ago, you had more time to ask for rereads with people and really find it. Nowadays, at least in the projects that we do, we cast for the leads and then I don’t always have the luxury to do a whole casting.

In the case of games and original animation, there is a limit to the number of unique voices you can do, but not with dubbing. That means an actor can come in and do 20 different voices across however many episodes.

So I know the importance of being versatile in that sense, because, let’s say I have a role, and it’s not as big as a guest role, but it’s got a little nice little two-scene story arc. Maybe 20 lines. I need someone to be able to pull that off, but, oh, shoot, I also have this random grandma that I need for one line, and they have three lines for a little boy.

Now my task is different than if I was just filling somebody in for that 20-line role, because now the appeal is going to be who can nail all those things.

How often do you pop yourself into these roles that you are casting?

My philosophy is, there are times when I have put myself in something, but only if I feel like I can’t find somebody, and I know that I can do it for an incidental. I know the slippery slope is to just cast myself in everything, so you work against it.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into voice acting?

More and more, I’m seeing people who are good voice artists, who are not necessarily as strong in the acting. They don’t speak the language of an actor, because they came from fandom or voice-over. When I started as an actor, I took Meisner classes.

I took study classes. You worked things in a different way. So my main thing would be, make sure you have a really good acting foundation. A lot of dub directors will tell you that we spend time almost teaching acting in the booth, and that’s not what the time is for.

Also, some actors come in with this sense of, “Oh, I can do whatever you want,” and that’s very different than a classically trained actor who offers their thoughts on the character. They need to have the agency, and they need to know what that means and feels like for making choices.

So then, would your advice to someone coming in to audition for you be the same thing? Make choices?

Yes, definitely, because the thing is, if you have a point of view and a clear sense, you’re going to naturally make more creative decisions. I’m now getting hundreds of submissions for one role, and people wonder why they don’t book, but 20% of the submissions that I get are just unusable, terrible, bad.

Then you have 10% that’s really stellar. And the rest of it, that 70%? It’s fine, but it’s very vanilla. Do you want to be in that 70%? So even if you make a strong choice, I can hear that there’s something behind that, even if it’s not right for that part, I’m going to flag it, because there’s so many other parts.

And with an original animated project, sometimes those things are not fleshed out yet. I’ve sat in a room where they’re not sure of what the character is until they hear it. They’re waiting for you to bring in the special magic thing.

Key Takeaways

Invest in serious acting training before focusing on voice-over specialization.

Approach every audition with a point of view that shows depth, intention, and originality.

Build relationships and versatility over time to create sustainable opportunities across performance and casting.