Not everybody who makes funny videos becomes successful, but for those who do, Ben Giroux is the poster child.
A comedic actor for years before he found success doing voice work, Giroux capitalized on the nascent days of the internet with funny short videos that went viral and helped him make a name for himself. That led to him becoming something of a one-man cottage industry, not just voicing animated characters, but also writing, producing and directing his work.
As well as he and his production company, Small Red Cape, have done, Giroux is best known for his work voicing kids’ shows like Henry Danger, on which he plays the show’s main villain, The Toddler, and Big Nate, in which he voices Nate himself. He spoke to us from his home in LA.
Insights: Lessons From Ben Giroux
- Create and share online content to showcase your talent and open up diverse opportunities in entertainment, like voice acting and production.
- Prioritize acting skills and get voice acting training. Prepare thoroughly for roles to maximize your performance and creativity.
- Build a strong personal brand on social media, while being conscious of your audience’s age, especially if you’re known for children’s entertainment.
How did you get started as an actor?
Oh gosh, I was always sort of a ham growing up. I grew up in Phoenix, although my mom’s from New York and my dad’s from Chicago, so I always found that I was kind of an East Coast kid who randomly grew up in the desert. I was always a cheese ball, doing silly voices for my little sister as a kid and school theater, that kind of thing.
I went to USC and was lucky enough to book a Farrelly Brothers pilot before the first writer strike in 2007. I was lucky that I started working in television as I was still in college, so I was able to transition a little less as a deer in headlights as some of my colleagues. I worked primarily as a comedic television actor for the first 10 years of my career in House, Bones, Anger Management and NCIS. I was popping in and doing a bunch of guest stars and recurring roles and that kind of thing.
How did that turn into a career in voice acting?
In the early days of YouTube, I started to make a lot of my content, working with some of the early big YouTube brands like FML, Failblog and the Fred Channel. It was my initial experience working with brands and ad agencies and started to direct a lot of my content, and it’s led to a very diverse entertainment career. I feel privileged to get to wear a lot of different hats, but one of those hats has become cartoon animation, especially over the last five or six years, with a long-standing relationship with Nickelodeon.
Did being an established comedic actor provide a natural transition into being able to do the voice work?
I think so. I coach actors for animation now as well, and one of the things that I work with people on is routinely talking to them about how it’s just storytelling. It’s just another outlet for acting and storytelling, telling jokes and being funny, but it all starts with connecting to a character and finding that authenticity. I look at voiceover on a broad level as just another medium for comedic storytelling.
Is there a more fulfilling freedom that comes with this, that you don’t get on camera?
Certainly one of my happy places is on a set, but voiceover is a more comfortable medium.
When you’re on camera acting, you’re trying to remember your lines and you’re trying to think about how you look and there’s all sorts of other things that factor into the equation to be able to do your job. Voiceover is a little more relaxed because you’ve got the lines right in front of you, so you don’t have the pressure of needing to memorize, although I will say I prep like crazy. I think if you are unbelievably prepared to stay within the lines, that’s when you can go outside the lines when you’re doing a job, whether it’s on camera or voiceover.
I think the onus is on the voice actor to prepare even more because we do have that freedom. Also, the thing that excites me about voiceover is you can channel that childlike creativity when we were young kids playing with action figures or dolls or toys or whatever, you let your imagination run wild.
Can you give an example?
You can get lost in it, how are they going to animate it? What is this shot going to ultimately look like?
One of the fun things as a voice actor is you can sort of subtly suggest how they draw it. I might be doing a scene and it’s just two characters talking back and forth, but, you know, if I start doing this [mimes eating something], suddenly they’re forced to draw an apple or a sandwich or something that the character is eating throughout the scene, and that changes the course of it.
In that regard, I think it provides some interesting creativity or creative opportunities that are not necessarily available to you on camera. At the end of the day, though, it’s just being funny. And making cool shit with my friends.
A lot of your content is geared towards kids. Is there a responsibility that goes with doing work targeted to a younger audience?
I think it’s a fine line that I walk throughout my career because I didn’t just start my career in animation. Because I play the main villain on Henry Danger, which is Nickelodeon’s longest-running superhero franchise, it is certainly the role that kids visually identify me [with] the most.
I can’t walk through Disneyland, for example, without kids wanting to take selfies with me, which is a very humbling position to be in with kids, but also one, to your point, that there comes a certain level of responsibility to be recognizable to a younger audience. I’m always walking that fine line on social media, for example. I have a lot of kids that follow me for Big Nate and Henry Danger.
At the same time, Henry Danger came out in 2014, so a lot of the kids who watch me on that show are now in their early 20s. I’m watching some of my audience get a little bit older, but I am mindful that I do have a young audience and with that comes some responsibility to make sure that they’re taken care of with the stuff that I’m posting.
As somebody who’s been doing this for so long, and as a coach, what’s your advice to someone who wants to become a voice actor?
That’s a great question. First of all, training is important, whether it’s with somebody like me who does one-on-one private coaching, or in a workshop setting, classes, you’ve got to put in your 10,000 hours to become an expert at something, no matter what you’re doing in life. Allow yourself the time to get good at it, to work it. Spend every day absorbing animation if you want to become a cartoon voice actor. Watch it. Toy around with your voice.
I look at voice acting as — I’ll give you my cake analogy. It’s a big chocolate cake and you’ve got 90% of this delicious cake and then this thin layer of icing, this 10% on top. The 90% is just acting. Let’s just get the acting locked in. Then if you can play around with pitch or texture, that’s the sweetening that’s on top of the acting. But you’ve got to start with this tasty cake because if you’re putting icing on something that tastes bad, it doesn’t matter.
Also, you should start posting yourself doing voices. Brand yourself. Branding is so critical, especially in our age of social media where you have to find your niche. I would encourage people to be immensely proactive about training and about putting themselves out there because anytime I’ve ever made something or been proactive about something, it has always given something positive back to me.
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