India de Beaufort is one of those actors you see a lot on screens, both big and small, and they immediately make you feel better. She’s got that way about her, and her roles reflect that.
From the kindergarten teacher playing the love interest of Schneider (her real-life husband Todd Grinnell) in Netflix’s One Day at a Time remake to the romantic lead of the beloved (and criminally underseen) Kevin (Probably) Saves the World, and most recently as assistant DA Olivia Moore in the rebooted Night Court series starring Melissa Rauch, de Beaufort is always a welcome presence.
Over the last few years, she’s also branched out into voice acting, appearing on New Looney Tunes, It’s Pony, SpongeBob SquarePants and Max and the Midknights. She took some time recently to talk to us from her home office, which doubles as a walk-in closet and is as colorful as she is.
Insights: Lessons From India de Beaufort
- Seize unexpected opportunities and always work on improving your acting skills.
- Build and maintain industry relationships to open doors for new roles and ventures.
- Develop resilience and be prepared to hustle for your career in the entertainment industry.
How did you start as an actor?
I didn’t want to be an actor. I wanted to be a singer. Both my parents were in the entertainment industry, so my mom was adamant that I should not be, just because she knew how difficult it was. She was a dancer, so at a certain point, that stopped, and she didn’t want me to have that insecurity.
By the time I was about 15, it was pretty evident that I had the bug and I was not going to let it go. A close family friend of ours was a manager and she took me on as a musician. Through that, I got put on The Basil Brush Show for three years, a children’s multi-cam in England. I was terrible. I was a very bad actor.
When did the shift happen? When did you figure out what you were doing?
It was acknowledged set-wide that they were made to have me on the show by the local company that I was signed to. They were lovely, but they put up with me, and my confidence was through the floor.
It never occurred to me I would act; I kept following the singing train. Then my commercial agent got me an audition for a movie called Run Fatboy Run that David Schwimmer was directing.
With Simon Pegg.
Yes! They couldn’t find the girl, so I randomly got an audition for something that I didn’t even have an agent for.
David was there in my first audition and he thought I had something. He said, “Hey, come back to the casting office. I want to see you again. We’re going to sit down for an hour. I want to work on this script with you and see what happens.” It was the first time that anyone ever showed any interest positively, and he taught me how to act.
So it’s fair to say that the success of Friends is directly responsible for you being a successful, working, professional actor.
(Laughs) Yeah. I was shooting [Night Court] the last couple of years, and one of the sound stages we were working on used to be one-half of the soundstage that Friends shot their pilot on. I remember the first time I was in my dressing room feeling a connection.
My first series regular job in the States was a show called Kröd Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, with Kevin Hart and some incredible Shakespearean actors. Six months into that job, one of the executives from Comedy Central said, “Do you know how you got this job? David originally was going to direct the show, and he said, ‘Hey, you should see India de Beaufort.’” He’s my fairy godmother.
It’s worked out pretty well for you. You have done very well in front of the camera, but you are also uniquely successful as a voiceover actor as well. You started as a singer, and I wonder if that has anything to do with your success there.
To be honest, it’s sheer dumb luck. Voiceover is a hard nut to crack because it very much is people hiring the same people all the time. There are these actors that you just hear over and over again.
I had a friend who was in casting at DreamWorks, and she gave me my first job. This is probably wrong, but I heard they had cast the role like 10 times. They just couldn’t figure it out. Anyway, I came in, my friend said, “Would you give it a shot?” I gave it a shot, and it was a similar situation. I said to them, “I’ve never done this before. I have no idea what I’m doing.”
The whole gang over at All Hail King Julien, that was the show, they took me under their wing and just went, alright, cool. Let’s go for it.
And thus, a new career is born.
(Laughs) If my son ever watches that show in the early episodes, oh, I’m wincing. I started to get the hang of it somewhere toward the end of those eight episodes.
Many of my jobs since then have been continuing to work with people who I’d worked with before. Plus, I think when you do 78 episodes of something, they end up seeing you do all these different things, so when that job ends, they know more of what you’re capable of than they did when you got there.
I want this to be taken the right way because it is meant to be positive, but is there a certain amount of “fake it till you make it” to your career that has worked out for you?
Absolutely. 1,000%.
I mean, my mom, without knowing it I think, set me up to be someone who could cope with our industry. She was just so cutthroat when it came to anything related to the business because she knew how badly I wanted to be a part of it. She toughened me up so that nobody else could ever get under my skin. She raised us to be polite, smart kids who worked hard.
I would shoot this children’s TV show for tuppence, come home and go to college on Friday, catch up with all my work and work at Ted Baker on Saturday. On Sunday, I’d drive back to the hotel I was staying in when I was 16 — alone without a parent — and then the next week, fly to Istanbul to shoot a commercial somewhere, [again] without a parent.
It was all very much independence and adventure, and that’s what this career is. You have to be tough. You have to be willing to say yes. You have to be willing to get on a plane at the last minute, all those things. I have to ask her if she did it on purpose, but either way, she did it.
That makes you grow up pretty fast, I would imagine.
Yeah, and I loved it. Now I look around, and generationally, we’ve gone backward. A lot of my friends will say their kids don’t want to learn to drive because they’d rather just get an Uber, and now I feel like the old lady who’s like, “Well, in my day …” (Laughs)
Do you find that your voice work has helped your on-camera acting?
I don’t know. It’s made me better at reading books to my kid in bed at night. (Laughs)
You mentioned before that the voice acting is a tough nut to crack. If somebody came to you as an up-and-coming actor, what would your advice be to get into it?
I wish I had an answer to that. I think I wish I had known more when I got involved.
I think there are classes that you could be taking to get those skills so that you do have a bit more of a skill set on your way in. Things I never knew, like if you bite a green apple, it stops you from being smacky when you talk into the mic, so you don’t hear the sound of saliva while you’re speaking, because whatever’s in the green apple cuts through it.
I think listening and watching a lot of cartoons helps. My husband’s an enormous fan of that. He watched every episode of Will and Grace 50 bajillion times, and then ended up on a multi-cam by the creators of Will and Grace, on the stage next to Will and Grace. I think there’s something to be said for that. You should know your industry.
I think having a voice in good shape is important so that you don’t get worn out. I have no advice for getting in through the door because of the way that I got in, but my general advice for life is if you want something bad enough, you’ve just got to hustle. Nothing’s coming to you. You have to make everything happen.
We have so many opportunities at our fingertips now to create content ourselves, and I think this, outside of sheer luck and hard work and hustling, is something you can be actively doing that just might have an impact.
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