How Voiceover Helped Oliver Vaquer Rekindle His Love for Acting

January 27, 2025 | Neil Turitz
Photo by Luke Fontana, courtesy of Oliver Vaquer.

Oliver Vaquer is a lovely human being overflowing with charm. I met him 25 years ago and, over the years, as our respective career paths went hither and yon, it was a lot of fun to see him find success.

Vaquer’s made waves both on and off camera on shows like Jane the Virgin, Andi Mack and the fantastic true crime podcast The Angel of Vine, which he also co-created and produced. His new series, the animated Max and the Midknights, is now airing on Nickelodeon. He spoke to us from his home in LA.

How did you get started as an actor?

My parents had photographs of my father in the theater and my mom was a musician, so that was always present in my life. I also have early memories and photographic evidence of Christmas parties my parents threw. My father would cut out a beard from construction paper and I would come in from the other room and pretend I was Santa.

The first thing I remember was being the emperor with his new clothes in kindergarten, and then I just always sort of followed that track.

I remember it being a part of my life as if it were just normal to be performing. My mom started taking me to some castings, I remember doing print work as a nine, 10 year old. Then came my teenage years and I got an agent.

I remember I didn’t want to do it for a while. I didn’t want to be taken out of school to go sit in these rooms with all these kids and their moms and read for stuff, so I rebelled. Then in high school, I found it again.

What was it that brought you back to it?

There was something about performing, about getting to walk in the shoes of another person, that was magical and necessary for a kid who didn’t feel like he had any place in the world.

I applied to [NYU] Tisch, got a full scholarship and went through the Atlantic Theater Company. Again, there was this little rebellion and I dropped out because I just, for some reason, didn’t want to do it. I’ve constantly rebelled against it and have found my way back into it, and part of finding my way back this time into adulthood was oddly enough through voiceover.

How so?

Voiceover gave me the practice of auditioning and being able to let go of the results because there was so much of it. There were so many auditions for voiceovers that you couldn’t keep track of all of them. It wasn’t about, “am I gonna get this?” When you don’t have a lot of opportunities in television or film or theater, all of those auditions would have so much more importance and I would wait by the phone and it was maddening.

Voiceover, there was so much volume that I forgot about stuff. I would book something and I’d be like, “when did I read for that?” It was great. It also gave me the anonymity of being able to work on my confidence, because I wasn’t being seen by anybody. I wasn’t conscious of how I looked. I wasn’t worried about any of that stuff that we worry about needlessly.

Sure. Because you’re not on camera, you can still be creative and do your thing.

Right. I’m not being self-conscious and not thinking about my acting. I’m a storyteller. That’s it. I take other people’s words and I interpret them. That’s what I do. Whether it’s commercial copy, whether it’s animation, whether it’s video game, whether it’s television, it’s other people’s words, I’m a delivery system.

Voiceover was huge for me because it gave me confidence. I was good at it and I started booking, which is something I wasn’t doing in film and television. That just leads to more confidence when you start booking, and you stop thinking about it.

I remember when we would hang out 20 years ago, thinking, for somebody who loved acting as much as you did, you were a spectacularly unhappy person because you hated everything about the process.

Here’s the thing. Nobody holds a gun to your head and says you have to be an actor. I would tell anyone, “if you don’t have to be, don’t do it. Not unless there is a ‘must’ inside of you to do it, because it is brutal.”

It’s constantly getting told no. You need to get out of the headspace of comparing yourself to other people, worrying about whether or not you’re doing it right, whatever that is.

And by the way, there’s no such thing. That’s the punchline. There’s no such thing as right. It’s legitimately your interpretation. They don’t know what they want until you go in. They really don’t.

I have that conversation with casting directors all the time.

They know when they see it. I’ve had two executive producers at two different times tell me, “you are not who I thought I was going to cast.”

As far as the casting process is concerned, you’ve got to do what you do and then let those people decide whatever they need to decide. I have no control over that part. I only have control over what I do when I go in the room or when I’m in front of a microphone. I do my version of it, and then if it ends up being a version that they want, great.

Most of your work these days is in animation. Was that hard to get into?

Incredibly hard to get into. No one’s going to want to hear this, but it’s the reality. I currently have a major recurring on a new show that launched last week on Nickelodeon called Max and the Midknights. We’ve been working on it for two and a half years, and it took me 13 years to get to this.

When I first got out here, I booked a video game called Bioshock Infinite. I loved Bioshock. Never in a million years did I think I would end up in that world. It was my first major booking out here as far as video games are concerned and it led to other opportunities. We won an award for our characters that year.

My first animation was Family Guy, where I replaced Robert Downey Jr. as Lois’s brother, and that was crazy. They’re wonderful notches in the belt and they’re great credits that exist there. They showed people I could do the job.

Do you find that acting is giving you now what it wasn’t 20 years ago?

One hundred percent. I had a friend say something to me five years ago that never left me, which was, “don’t believe anything your head tells you when you’re not doing what you love.”

The day that I spent on set on Barbie was the greatest professional experience of my life. Greta Gerwig was wonderful, and she gave me an opportunity that a lot of people don’t get. It’s the biggest production I’d ever been on and Greta comes over and introduces herself and she says, “well, I wrote this but feel free to play with it.”

They yelled “action” and I just started improv-ing. When they cut, the entire set broke. To make that many people laugh at something that big, there was something about that moment that was bigger than the lie that my head tells me as a creative. The head could come in and go, “you’re worthless, you’re never going to this, you’re too old.” The moment was so big that it was like, “that’s not true, but thanks for sharing.”

I stopped worrying about stuff as much. I keep going, and I’m lucky that I can do that. ‘Cause that’s what it’s about, right? It’s a dream to do something creative that fills me up and reminds me that it’s why I’m here.

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