In Conversation with Voice Actor Jon Bailey

December 12, 2024 | Neil Turitz

If you have ever heard even one episode of the internet sensation that is Honest Trailers, then you have heard the voice of Jon Bailey. Even if not, though, it’s very possible you’ve heard his voice mimicking Dwayne Johnson or Ryan Reynolds, or maybe in a Transformers movie, or any number of other video games or animated TV shows or films.

Bailey is a unique talent who finds at least part of his success by being able to ape the voices of others, but of course there’s so much more to him than that. He is not just a talented voice actor, he’s also on the autism spectrum, something about which he is very public, and which makes him an inspiration to fans all over the world. He spoke to us from his home in Los Angeles. 

How did you get into acting in the first place? 

Oh, accidentally. Happened to be in the right place at the right time kind of situation. A lot of background and performance stuff all through school and church, but there was a local studio that happened to have a chain across the country, and one happened to be in Memphis where I lived at the time. It was one of those, “worst thing they can do is say, no,” things. It only cost me 15 minutes of time to go down there.

They said they were looking for voice talent and to do like a minute’s worth of something. So I grabbed a copy of The Night Before Christmas I happened to have that we read to our kids every year, and just did a voice or an accent or something on every page and went down there. That was my “audition” for the studio, and they said, “can you come back? ‘Cause we might have something for you.”

Did they?

They booked me maybe one or three times a month. I thought that was terrible, but they said, “we have people who’ve been here five years, never booked a thing, you’re doing fine.” Then the following year, the housing crisis happened, the bubble popped, and I had no job to go back on. They went bankrupt along with a lot of other companies. So I took what little 401(k) money I had and cashed it out. I took unemployment.

I raked, mowed grass, fixed computers, washed cars, whatever I could do while doing voiceover full time to just try to get by. That first year was pretty rough, but there was a studio trailer house out in LA that happened to hear a YouTube video that I’d posted, and it kind of went viral-ish. It had 30-something thousand views and then Don LaFontaine, the godfather of movie trailer voices, passed away.

My first manager found my video when he did a search for Don LaFontaine Voice, and he thought I had a lot of raw potential and wanted to work with me. He sent me four trailers to try out for, and I booked three of them on the first try. 

What? Really? Was it that simple?

I didn’t even know they were really auditions. He said, I think you’ve got a lot of potential here, and if we let my producer work with you, we can come up with your own unique movie trailer voice rather than just doing all these impressions of all these different movie trailer guys. He gave me a cool contract that was way more than I actually made, and was pretty much how it went for a couple of years. 

If you were doing movie trailers, is that how you hooked up with the Honest Trailers guys?

My website was like a pre-Netflix page with all these thumbnails of movies on it, because that at the time was the thing I booked the most. That’s how Honest Trailers originally spotted me online. They didn’t really tell me much other than, “what do you think about this?”

I’m like, oh, you want me to make fun of myself. Yeah, I get it. By the third one, we caught our stride and then it blew up. I actually asked them early on, Why aren’t we doing family-friendly and kids movies and horror movies? Why aren’t we doing video games? So eventually they expanded it out and Frozen became our biggest hit. Billions of views or something. It was insane.

Did that lead to doing the video games?

It ended up being something similar to that first thing. A guy from 2K Games reached out to me, like, “hey, I saw your video where you were doing this Optimus Prime voice, and I had this vision for this character for my game. Would you be interested?”

He knew I was not just some YouTuber, and so that opened the door for video games. Then when I started doing soundalikes, at first I started with trailers because there’s the red band and the green band, and you have to do a lot of ADR so it sounds smooth, instead of hacking up a sentence from the movie so the trailer doesn’t sound heavily edited. The very first one I did was for Dwayne Johnson, and nobody even noticed it was me. I started building this resume for that.

It’s pretty remarkable, how things have progressed in your career.

Everything’s just worked out great. I sit back and watch my life like it’s a movie, rather than it feeling like it’s a crazy amount of work and I have to panic and be anxious and nervous about everything. I’ve just learned that if I’m myself and just do my job, a job I’m really good at and I really enjoy doing, that just seems to be a recipe for getting rehired over and over again. As long as it doesn’t cross a moral, ethical, or personal line for me and the opportunity allows, I just say yes. 

You have talked about being on the autism spectrum. Do you think that that is help or hindrance to your career?

Both. It comes with a specific set of superpowers with each person. Hyper focus can be an amazing skill. I can work on something and it will be absolutely impeccable by the time I’m done with it, but then when I look around, I have ignored everything around me. My own health, my food, my people, jobs, whatever. Everything else just kind of fades away. It’s the same thing when I go into a session, I’d rather be undirected.

You’ll get a better performance out of me, because I’ll be able to use that superpower of hyper focus and not think about being a goldfish in a bowl being stared at the entire time. Or to be socially awkward and not be able to understand social cues or not be able to manage the bridge between my brain and my mouth fast enough. 

That must be difficult, being a public figure now because of the popularity of the work you’re doing.

It can be mentally exhausting. People have no idea the kind of things that I have to overcome mentally, socially, and personally just to be able to entertain them and put on a happy face and be positive to be encouraging and inspirational.

Because I came from being the nerdy kid who never even heard of a pop culture convention, just sitting at home alone, no friends, watching cartoons, to being on the other side of the thing, where I’m actually the guest at the convention talking to kids like me who grew up the same way. I’ve lost 150 pounds as well, so I’ve tried to be both mentally and physically healthy. Both of those things make a lot of people go, if he can do it, I can do it. 

Is that rewarding, meeting people who see you as an inspiration and a role model? Or does your being on the spectrum make it more of a burden?

I know that there’s a balance of being fake and being real because you have to put on a happy face to meet a thousand people. That can be emotionally draining. It can be physically exhausting. But when I relay the information about where you can learn to do this and how to get started, things that they can do on their own, alone in a booth where they can function better, it’s like a light bulb comes on.

Like, somebody finally talked to them like a real person and they felt it, ’cause I can see that they want the same thing I did. I give them real information and I’m just straightforward about it. I’ve seen people on the spectrum that went from being that person talking to me on the other side of the table to being main characters in major anime shows, so I know it’s possible. I never know which one of those kids is gonna be the next Steven Spielberg or George Lucas. You have no clue. You shouldn’t discount them because they’re a little different. I’m a little different. A lot of people discounted me and yet here I am.

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