There aren’t a lot of successful actors who started when they were kids and kept it going through adulthood. They’re out there, of course, but they tend to be few and far between. Because of that, Ben Diskin is one of Hollywood’s best success stories. As a little boy, he was one of the kids in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s class in the 1990 comedy, Kindergarten Cop, but after realizing that being on camera wasn’t for him, he transitioned to a voice career that, 30-plus years later, is still going strong.
He has nearly 400 IMDb credits to his name, including such epic video game franchises like Final Fantasy and The Last of Us, and such iconic roles as Skeletor from the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series and Venom in The Spectacular Spider-Man, among many, many others. He spoke to us from his home in LA.
How did you get started as an actor in the first place?
I was very fortunate that both of my parents are actors and they lived in Los Angeles. When I was a little kid, they figured, hey, you know what? Maybe we put our kid in the business and he earns some money, and then we put it away in a college fund and he can go get a real job when he’s older, thanks to his wonderful college degree.
I did go to college with the money they saved from my childhood acting. I got my college degree. It is worth absolutely nothing. (Laughs) It is hanging on a wall in my parents’ place. They are very proud of me for getting it, but I did not do anything with it. I just wound up sticking with the acting stuff.
I know you were one of the kids in Kindergarten Cop. So … there’s that, right?
I did on-camera work when I was a kid, and probably the last thing I did, I was maybe 19. But around age 10, I started doing voiceover, and I liked it way more than I liked doing on-camera work because … you mentioned Kindergarten Cop. I was very stupid as a kid.
I was very happy to be in a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I told all the kids on the playground about it and they started being extremely nice to me because they thought I was a movie star with millions of dollars, because that’s how that works. Then when they realized I was in fact not rich and famous, they got very mad, felt they were lied to, even though I never told them I was rich and famous. They started treating me like garbage and I said, I don’t like acting! Everybody’s mean to me because of this! This sucks!
Yeah, that doesn’t sound great.
I don’t like getting bullied, but voiceover-wise, the very first animated series I ever did was based on the Problem Child movies from the the 90s, and I played the Problem Child. My own friends didn’t recognize me. They would watch that show and I had to tell them, Hey guys, don’t tell anybody, but that’s me. They said oh, that’s nonsense, and I delivered a line and they went, oh my gosh, that is you!
I realized, well, my own friends don’t recognize me, I can be an actor and not have to deal with being recognized by people who are gonna be mean to me. I like this more. Then I just focused on voiceover from that point forward.
It’s interesting to me that most people, even child actors, it’s about the attention. It’s about being on camera and being recognized. I think that you’re the first person I’ve ever talked to where it’s the opposite.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it might come from my parents who had a very realistic expectation of the entertainment industry. Which is, hey, this job really sucks. It’s really hard to make it. We don’t expect anything from you. I just thought, Oh, this is just fun.
I get to play and play pretend and go do neat stuff. That’s all it really was to me. I was really, really lucky that I did not become a child actor in the worst kind of way.
I’m curious about that perspective of growing up in an industry where you basically were able to put yourself through college without necessarily anybody knowing who you were, and still being creatively fulfilled.
Look, this industry, if you can get work, it’s the greatest job in the world. When you’re not working, it is one of the most terrifying. But when you’re a kid and you live at home with mommy and daddy, you don’t have to pay rent, there’s considerably less pressure on you to to succeed.
I would say when I was a kid, the biggest challenge was the transition from being a child voice actor to being an adult voice actor. As soon as you don’t sound like a little boy anymore and you sound like a man, that’s where a lot of child voice actors just kind of fall off. It’s a very, very challenging leap to make.
How do you think that you were able to make that leap?
I’ll just be blunt, I’m very privileged. I was able to stay at home until I was in my early 20s and not have to worry about rent, and that basically gave me a lot of opportunities to struggle and fail and then struggle and then fail and then occasionally book something, learn from that struggle, fail, struggle, fail, repeat, until finally I was able to get on my feet.
If I didn’t have a home base where I’d had access to these opportunities, I think I would have given up a long time ago. I don’t think I would have made that jump.
Was there one thing that really broke for you? That cemented you as an adult voice actor?
Oh, man, I wish there was. No, it was just a lot of bashing my head against the wall, trying to make those inroads. Eventually, you can make it if you’re tenacious enough.
I find that fascinating. You have worked so much on so many things, and there wasn’t a moment when you thought, “I think I can stop banging my head against the wall”?
Let me give you an example. I literally won an Emmy award. Nobody cares. It’s one of those things that other people look at and go, “wow! Shiny trophy!” I have never met a single casting director who said, “you know, it was between you and this other person, but you got a shiny trophy from an academy, so we hired you.”
Those things don’t really matter. It’s all gonna come down to your auditions, your performance and your reputation. People will say about this industry, it’s all about who you know. I would argue it’s all about who knows you. The difference might sound subtle, but it’s because you are a person that they can reliably come to for good performances.
You have voiced a lot of established characters. Is there more pressure for a gig like that?
I’ve been in a position where I’ve never had to really recapture the original magic of a different performer. Like, “we need somebody who sounds like Mel Blanc doing the Loony Tunes.” That’s not my area of success. My area has always been to make my own take on a pre-established character.
I know that your experience is very unique, but I would imagine that you meet a lot of people who either are aspiring voice actors or want to get into it. What advice would you give to somebody who wanted to get into the field?
Oh gosh, the industry has changed so much since I was a kid. I would say, be careful where you get your advice from. There are a lot of well-meaning people who will take your money to try to help you, but who don’t really know what they’re doing. My advice is, regardless of who the teacher is, how well-respected they are, focus on finding someone whose teaching style makes sense to you.
Don’t adapt to their lessons. Go with somebody whose lessons make sense natively in your brain. If it’s not working, if you’ve been taking several classes from them and you just feel like you’re not getting anywhere and you’re spinning your wheels, you might want to move on. There’s no harm in that.
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