Yuri Lowenthal and Tara Platt might not be the most prolific couple in Hollywood, but you would be hard-pressed to find a married couple who have more IMDb credits than they do. Two of the best voice actors in the business, they have combined for more than a thousand movies, TV shows, and video games — Yes, over 1,000 — so it’s hard to pin down how they’re best known. For Lowenthal, it might be for voicing Spider-Man, or maybe Ben-10. For Platt? Probably the World of Warcraft video games, or perhaps any number of anime projects on which you can hear her work. Married for 23 years, they have essentially become their own cottage industry, and are now branching off into publishing. They have co-written the very fun new graphic novel, Topsy McGee and the Scarab of Solomon, which they may or may not turn into their own animated series (see below). They spoke to us from their home in LA.
How did you start as actors in the first place?
Tara Platt: I started acting at eight or nine, because I went to see a show with my mom, and there were a bunch of kids in the chorus. I was like, Wait, kids can be in shows too? From that point on, I was pretty hooked. I did my first audition, and I never turned back. I was like, Oh, this is what I’m doing with my life.
Yuri Lowenthal: I had a lot of interests growing up. I was always sort of a storyteller, but I never really thought of pursuing it. I’d always wanted to try out for a play, but I always kept putting it off, until my last year of high school, when I said, if I don’t try it before I go off to college, I probably won’t. I just immediately fell in love with it, but even then, did not consider that it could be any sort of career job. My dad wanted me to go into international relations like him, and I just assumed that I would. But after two years of government work out of college, I was spending all my free time doing theater and making stupid movies with my friends and taking classes. So I said, the government work’s not going anywhere, I will try this, and if it doesn’t work out, I can always come back. I just don’t want to look back 30 years from now and wonder if I could have done that. I moved to New York …
TP: And then we met. We came out to Los Angeles because, at the time, I had an agent that wanted me to do pilot season. We eloped on the drive out, and then were just in LA, looking for work.
How did that turn into voice work?
TP: We were auditioning for television and film, booking some things here and there, wondering, what else can we do? I said, Well, what about those Saturday morning cartoons? Of course, he was mortified, because he grew up watching them, but I didn’t have a television growing up, I just knew that it was a thing. So we both took a class, and then started booking and getting agents, and then took off. We’re most known for that, but we still do television and film, we have our own production company, and now, of course, we have a publishing company where we did our voiceover book and our novels and our graphic novel and all of that.
We’ll talk about Topsy McGee, but you sort of glossed over something. It couldn’t have been that easy, just breaking into the business.
TP: You’re right. I mean, it’s not necessarily easy. We were fortunate that the person teaching the class that we took happened to also be casting an animated series, and Yuri got cast on that when we were taking the class. We were coming as actors, we had the skill set, and they needed young male voices. At the same time, I got an agent. They heard my demo, and they liked my sound. So I started booking through my agent, and then Yuri got an agent, so we did have parallel paths. We both booked the Japanese anime Naruto, and then more people started to know us as a couple.
YL: Everybody’s got a slightly different story. I wish that there were an “A plus B equals you get this result,” but everybody sort of comes to it in a different way. My entree into Warner Brothers was because I had been working with somebody on a Japanese anime show, and they knew that I spoke Japanese from my previous life, as it were. They were casting people who speak Japanese for this three-episode run of Teen Titans Go!, where they go to Tokyo. So you never know what’s going to be the thing.
You are both incredibly prolific. Is there a secret to your success?
TP: I wish there was a secret. I think mostly it’s, do a good job. You’re easy to work with, you show up on time. You’re professional, you do your work so that you make it easy for other people to do their work. Then hopefully you’re talented enough, or your skill set is varied enough that it gives more possibility for opportunities. We were people you could rely on and depend on. And then work begets work.
YL: Probably a lot of those credits are things I didn’t get paid for. Films I made with my friends.
TP: No, no, I would say, like, 20 of the credits are things that you did when you first started. We have a son now, so life has changed, but there was a time when you would have four sessions in a day on four different projects. You would drive all over town. That was just what your day was.
You have both played iconic parts, and I wonder if there’s more pressure when you play someone like Spider-Man.
YL: Yeah, 100%. On two levels, too. One, that it’s an iconic character that people already have seen many times and have very strong feelings about. And two, that I grew up a comic book and movie nerd, so I don’t want to be the guy to mess this up, because I already love it so much. [To Tara] And you have a Wonder Woman story as well. Even when you were recording Wonder Woman for DC vs. Mortal Kombat, they had like 20 people on the phone.
TP: It was a phone session where I was in studio with the director, but there was a panel of people, producers and stuff. So I would do a line, and then they would go round robin, weighing in on whether they thought that was “Wonder Woman” enough. It was quite intimidating. You’re like, I want to do what you’re looking for, but I’m also trying to put my spin on it.
Has it helped you, being a couple?
TP: I think it did,
YL: I think it does sometimes, yeah,
TP: I mean it was hard to not have people know that we were a couple. We weren’t trying to hide it. People were like, Oh, it’s Tara and Yuri.
YL: They also see us creating our own things together.
That’s a perfect segue to talk about Topsy McGee. Where did the idea come from?
YL: Topsy was a character we came up with on our own, and would just sort of tell each other stories to pass the time. Then at a convention, I met an artist I liked, and I commissioned a piece of artwork that was Tara as Topsy McGee. As soon as we saw it, she sort of crystallized in a way that she had not before. It was like she was real all of a sudden. From that, we commissioned a costume for Tara, and then once we saw her in costume, we’re like, we gotta do a film of this.
TP: The time period is silent film, so we said, We’ll make a short silent film! That would be fun!
YL: So we pitched a TV show for a little while. It was a bad time for steampunk and television, so that didn’t come to fruition. (Laughs) But we were not done telling the story of these characters. There was a whole world that we still wanted to explore.
TP: And we thought, What could we still have control over and actually make happen without having bajillions of dollars, or to wait for a green light? Yuri had the idea to make it a comic book. Now, since it came out, people in the last week or two have been like, Well, why wouldn’t you do an animated series? We didn’t even think of that.
Come on.
TP: I know.
YL: I know, I know.
It never occurred to you? Voice actors who specialize in animated fare? I’m very skeptical of this.
TP: We haven’t created our own animated show! The idea of us having to build the train and the train tracks and all of that, it’s a big endeavor. It is really a great idea, though. It would be really fun if we could do this as an animated series and embody these characters. I want to see stories of couples who succeed because they’re fun together. I think there is a need for that kind of storytelling in the world. People aren’t seeing married couples who stay together, and I do think that that is part of the charm.
You are both wildly successful in your field, and I wanted to know if you had any advice for someone wanting to break into voice acting.
TP: Have fun. Don’t forget that, at the end of the day, any acting should be something that you’re mining in yourself. It’s not always fun to have to edit all your auditions together and send that in, or try to be getting an agent or whatever those technical minutia of the industry is, but remember that what you love is the doing of it, so don’t lose that. Also, don’t worry so much about what other people think. Don’t worry if you make an idiot of yourself. Maybe that’s the perfect thing that is going to cut through the noise of everybody else doing it the same.
YL: To hitch to that, we live in an age where it’s hard to be an actor in this business. You’re constantly waiting for somebody to say it’s okay for you to do the thing that you’re here to do and that you love doing. But we now have the technology to create our own stories and put them out there. I think that the more we own that and take control of that, we can play the kinds of characters we want to play, that we got into this business to play. Even if it’s not filling your pockets, it’s filling your heart, and the love is what’s going to keep you going through the hard times in this business.
