A Legend Talking to a Legend
I've been name-dropping Troy Baker in coaching sessions for YEARS... and after this conversation, I'm going to do it even more.
If you've worked with me 1:1, you've heard it. When an actor asks me what "making it" actually looks like, I point at Troy. Not because of the trophies (he has a shelf of them), and not because of the fame (he'd be the first to shrug that off). I point at him because of HOW he works. The way he talks about choices. The way he talks about gratitude. The way he talks about the people who took a chance on him.
So when Jim Cummings sat Troy down on his podcast, Toon'd In! with Jim Cummings, I put down everything I was doing. Jim is a LEGEND. Winnie the Pooh. Tigger. Darkwing Duck. Pete. Hondo Ohnaka. Thousands of voices that raised generations of us. And Troy is, in my mind, a CURRENT legend... the guy whose name working voice actors say with a little bit of awe and a little bit of "how does he DO that?"
I went through the whole conversation (twice, with a mental highlighter, because of course I did). What follows are the lessons that line up with what I preach in my booth every single week... sometimes almost word for word. Let's dig in.
Who Is Troy Baker? (The Short Version of a VERY Long Resumé)
By his own telling on the show, Troy was a musician first. A drummer from Dallas who planned to set the world on fire with music, and who later fronted the rock band Tripp Fontaine. The band was always "one meeting away" from the big break. Meanwhile, other doors kept quietly opening.
He started out voicing radio commercials in Dallas. Then Christopher Sabat brought him into Funimation to dub anime, starting with Case Closed and growing into Fullmetal Alchemist, Naruto, Bleach and a mountain more. Around age 30, a three-month shoot in New Mexico on Comanche Moon (the Larry McMurtry Western miniseries) cracked the next door open. He packed up for Los Angeles... and what came next reads like a video game hall of fame:
2013 broke the dam. Booker DeWitt in BioShock Infinite. Joel in The Last of Us (voice AND full performance capture). The Joker in Batman: Arkham Origins. Entertainment Weekly named him a breakout actor of the year for all three.
Then everything else. Sam Drake in Uncharted 4. Higgs in Death Stranding. Loki and Hawkeye across Marvel animation. Batman in the Lego games, Telltale's Batman series and Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (where he voiced Batman AND the Joker in the same film). Jonesy in Fortnite.
Indy. His Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (2024) won a D.I.C.E. Award and the New York Game Award for acting, and earned a Game Awards Best Performance nomination. At the 2024 Game Awards, Harrison Ford himself walked on stage and told the room Troy did a great job.
The record. He holds the record for the most acting nominations at the BAFTA Games Awards: seven, between 2013 and 2026.
He's also behind the glass now. He has directed motion capture (Middle-earth: Shadow of War), and he told Jim that performance directing is where he feels himself heading. That matters for this conversation, because a LOT of the wisdom below comes from the director's chair.
And here's the part I want newer actors to really sit with: Troy is a voice actor who became a FULL-BODY performer. In games today, "voice actor" often means a mocap suit, a head-mounted camera, a stunt coordinator and a scene partner in the volume with you. The voice is one piece of the performance, not the whole thing. (My own door into that world was puppetry. I did the motion capture performance for a puppet character in The Gunstringer back in 2011, and I've been in the video game space since 2006... so believe me when I say the body and the voice are the same instrument.)
Lesson 1: No Director Wants a Lucky Actor
This is the one I'll be quoting for the rest of my life.
Troy was casting a game he was directing. An actor came in, and when the team told them they'd been called in because of their tape AND their past work, the actor gave the most natural answer in the world... some version of "I've just been so lucky."
Something went BING in Troy's head. He didn't say it out loud, but he made a note to himself: no director wants a lucky actor.
Think about it from the other side of the glass. Nobody casting a project wants to roll the dice and rub a rabbit's foot, hoping you can perform. They want sharpshooters. Green Berets. The person who walks in and says, with their whole body, "I can execute."
Troy called "I've been so lucky" a FALSE humility, because it quietly dismisses every person who looked at you and saw something. The director who gave you a shot. The producer who paid you real money and then hired you again. The friend who introduced you to the person who hired you. Troy said he can name most of them, job by job. He would rather invest in gratitude for those people's choices than chalk it all up to luck and hope the luck doesn't run out.
Jim, being Jim, added the perfect button: gratitude is the key to happiness.
I can name all of mine too. One of the many, back in the in-studio days in New York, an engineer named Patrick at one of the studios I worked in asked me point-blank if I'd be interested in narrating a slate of audiobooks coming through. That one question changed the game for me. It led to youth and middle grade titles, and to narrating full textbooks for visually impaired students... still the work I'm proudest of. That wasn't luck. That was a PERSON making a choice, and me showing up ready to prove them right.
What I tell my actors: Stop apologizing for being in the room. Be grateful, absolutely... but grateful to PEOPLE, not to dice. Then walk in like the sharpshooter they were hoping for. (Just make sure you've put in the range time first. Don't let your pitch write checks your read can't cash.)
Lesson 2: Restrictions Are the Best Teachers
Troy credits his anime dubbing years with honing his chops, and his reason is pure gold: “restrictions are the best teachers.”
When the whole world is your oyster, it can be paralyzing. "Do whatever you want" is a terrifying note. Dubbing hands you the opposite. Here's the scene. Here's EXACTLY how many lip flaps you get. Now sell it... and while you're at it, carry a moment from another culture across so it lands for this audience. That's a performance with walls around it, and walls are where technique gets built.
He said the same about ADR. A production will block out a whole day for a handful of loops, and the dub-trained actor is in and out. His advice to actors who say they hate ADR? Go do anime. (Jim's advice: then you'll REALLY hate it. Hahaha)
Later in the conversation, Troy carried the same idea into the music studio. He told a story about cutting a vinyl record and learning that each side has a time limit... go long, and the sound has to pay for it. Back in the two-inch tape days, an engineer would tell the band to get it together, because you can't keep rolling tape back and forth forever. Everybody better play good. This better be the take. Once we got unlimited tracks and endless undo, he said, we stopped treating the work like it deserved our full attention.
I felt this one in my bones. I went full time in VO in 2003, before home studios were a thing, back when you drove (or took the subway - like me) to the session, stood in someone else's booth and NAILED IT in a few takes because the clock was running. These days I also sit on the other side of the glass directing ADR and dubbing, and from that chair, an actor who already knows how to live inside a restriction is a GIFT.
And puppetry? Puppetry is nothing BUT restrictions. A mouth that opens one way. (Or doesn’t even have a mouth). Eyes that never blink. (Or NO EYES at all). Every choice has to fit through that tiny window... and that's exactly why it gets so specific.
Try this: Give yourself the Three-Take Rule this week. Pick a script, set up, and allow yourself three takes, top to bottom, no punch-ins. Pick the best one and live with it. You'll be shocked how much sharper take one gets when it isn't just a warm-up for take forty-seven.
(If dubbing is calling your name, my Approaching Dubbing and ADR guide walks through lip sync, loops and anime localization, including where to find the companies doing the work.)
Lesson 3: Make a Choice (Any Choice. Even Ice Cream.)
If you don't know the name Gordon Hunt, fix that today. He started directing voice actors at Hanna-Barbera in the 1970s, then became the motion capture and voice director behind the early Uncharted games and helped out on The Last of Us. Troy said his is a name that should never fade into obscurity, and I agree.
Troy told a story from casting the brothers Henry and Sam for The Last of Us. A young actor was reading for Sam, with Troy reading Joel opposite. Gordon pulled the kid aside and asked one question: what does your character want from Joel?
The kid thought about it and said: his trust.
Gordon said, "Exactly. Show me that." The kid went back in and nailed it.
Afterward, Troy pulled Gordon aside and (very politely) disagreed. He thought Sam wanted Joel's RESPECT, not his trust. And Gordon told him he didn't care what the answer was. The kid just needed to make a choice. He could have said ice cream. His reads had been all over the place, and he needed ONE thing to anchor to. (Troy admits Neil Druckmann remembers this story a little differently. Troy likes his version better. So do I.)
Here's why that matters so much. Troy said too many directors hand actors the answers: you're angry, you want this, this is your motivation. And his response is: where's the WHY? Let me find that. Later, directing a session himself, he asked an actor what she wanted... and she froze. She didn't know. His take is that we've bred a generation of actors who wait to be told, partly because of rushed sessions and directors cramming a mountain of material into too little time.
If you’ve worked with me for even 5 mins, you know I am ALWAYS asking you “WHY?”
This is the beating heart of how I teach. One of the very first things I tell every new actor is that the words on the page don't matter. Every line is a MOMENT your character just happens to be speaking into, and the voice comes LAST, after you know who they are, where they are, what's going on, and what they're thinking, feeling and doing. "What do I want?" is the engine under all of it. The character's MOTIVATION.
Now... for today's actors: in most self-taped auditions, there IS no Gordon Hunt to pull you aside. Nobody asks you what you want. You have to be your own director before you're anybody else's actor.
Try this: Before every audition, write one line at the top of the script. "I want ____ from ____." Make the want something you can PLAY (to be forgiven, to win, to get them to laugh), not a mood (sad, angry). Then make every line a tactic to get it.
Lesson 4: Nobody Plays a Villain
Troy just played a deeply disturbed man in a new Netflix game (he pitched it as Rear Window meets Saw. I’ve played it, it’s fun). It was full performance capture, with some genuinely dark places to go.
His approach? Play that character without judgment. Because we are ALL the heroes of our own story.
Then he dropped a line I've already written on a sticky note: he says he has NEVER played a villain. The story might edit him into the villain. He'll play an antagonist all day long. But in his head, he's the hero of HIS story... the filmmakers just chose to move the camera around. Otherwise, as he put it, you might as well paint on a mustache and let him twirl it.
Jim, who has played more charming scoundrels than almost anyone alive, agreed and took it somewhere delightful. His pirates (Don Karnage in TaleSpin, Hondo Ohnaka in Star Wars) never think they're villains. They think they're BUSINESSMEN. Opportunists. Hondo will happily hold children for ransom... but Hondo Ohnaka does not harm children, and they will have sandwiches. And playtime. (I laughed out loud. Then I took notes.) Jim's one exception: the old-school cartoon baddie who knows he's the baddie, which is a style choice, and a totally valid one.
One more detail from Troy's Netflix story that every performer needs to hear. Before a physical scene, he sat down with his stunt performer scene partner and asked: what are our boundaries? If he was going to put his hands on her, they needed that conversation first. She was all in ("let's get weird")... but he ASKED. As someone who has been puppet captain on film and TV sets, and stage managed a touring show while performing in it, I want to underline that in red pen. Going to dark places safely is a professional skill, not a buzzkill.
Try this: Next time you get villain sides, write a short paragraph in the character's first person explaining why they're RIGHT. Not evil. Right. If you can't defend them, you're not ready to play them yet.
Lesson 5: If You're Bored, You Should Have Said No
Chris (Jim’s cohost) asked Troy if there's ever a place he's afraid to go as a performer. Troy's answer was two words: every job.
And then this: if he's bored, he should have said no.
A role that doesn't scare you a little isn't stretching you. He WANTS the jobs that challenge him.
What does that do to your mental health? Troy answered with a question. How does a run feel to your body? Hard work is supposed to be hard. The trick is being built to handle it, and Troy's whole approach is holistic. Mind and body aren't separate systems; he can't expect one to be good if the other is falling apart. So: move your body. Get out in nature. Talk to people. Don't isolate. Don't insulate yourself from the world like it's out to get you.
He and his wife share a tattoo: "We do hard things." They teach their 8-year-old son to choose his hard. (There's a fantastic story about a promised cold shower and a dad being a man of his word. Go listen. Everybody was laughing by the end, which is kind of the point.)
This one matters extra for voice actors, because Jim nailed our occupational hazard early in the episode: most of the time, we're alone in a room. The home booth is a beautiful thing and also a lonely one. If your whole creative life happens in a padded closet, your performances will start to sound like it.
It also lines up with a quote I keep close from Jim Henson: "The only way the magic works is through hard work. But hard work can be fun." Choose your hard. Then find the FUN inside it. Serious craft. Serious passion. Serious FUN... otherwise what's the point?
Try this: Look at your last month of auditions and ask honestly which ones scared you. If the answer is "none," go find something that does. A genre you've avoided. A character way outside your comfort zone. A class. And then get out of the booth: take a walk before you read, call another actor, go to a meetup. Your instrument is your whole self, so feed the whole self.
Lesson 6: Build a Voice You Can Live In
Troy named a nightmare every character actor knows. You book a brand-new character, the team loves it, everybody's thrilled... and somewhere in the back of your head a little voice says, "I don't know if I can SUSTAIN this." It sounds great for the first fifteen lines. Then the second hour hits. His rule: if you choose a voice, make sure it's a sustainable one. (Jim's evil-producer impression: "You're gonna LOVE the books on tape we've got coming up for you.")
Then Jim told my favorite war story of the whole episode: My Interactive Pooh, a talking Pooh toy that personalized its stories with the child's name. The stories took about a month and a half to record. The NAMES took the next eight months. Every name in the world, one at a time. (And if you've ever wondered which letter has the most names: Jim says it's D.)
Troy jumped right on the craft problem hiding inside that gig. Our brains love patterns, so after a few dozen names we start adding inflections to keep ourselves entertained. But each name is heard ALONE, dropped into the same sentence, so every single one has to land exactly the same way. Try saying your ABCs without singing them. That's the job.
And Jim added a lesson he learned the hard way on one of the very first episodes of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. He went in with a head cold because of that blue-collar "forge ahead" work ethic. Years later, watching the episode on his mom's VHS recording, he heard it, plain as day. The lesson: if you're sick, stay home. They can do it next week. The recording is forever.
All three of these are the UNGLAMOROUS side of the craft, and they're the ones that keep you hired. Audiobook narrators live this; across a series you're voicing a whole cast for hours and books at a time. Corporate, e-learning and phone system work live it too. When a client comes back months later for pickups, those new lines have to drop seamlessly in next to the old ones. It's also why I sequence my coaching the way I do: performance foundation first, then the technical affectations (gravel, size, creature) once we know the instrument can carry them safely.
Try this: Before you submit a big character voice, read three pages straight in it. If your throat is complaining by page three, imagine a four-hour session. Then record a short reference clip of every character you book and save it with the project, so you can match it perfectly when the pickups come.
Lesson 7: You Don't Own the Character (and That's the Beautiful Part)
Troy is one of very few actors to voice both Batman AND the Joker. (A Warner Bros. publicist pitched it as a marketing hook for Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Troy's joke: the epitome of double dipping.)
He was also the very first voice of Lego Batman, across the games and a run of animated movies. Then one day on the Warner Bros. lot, his producer introduced him to Will Ferrell as "Lego Batman," got an oddly knowing reaction... and a couple of weeks later, the big-screen Lego movie was announced with Will Arnett as Batman. That's how Troy found out. His own son later informed him that he didn't like the other Batman BETTER... he just liked those movies better. (Tens of millions of dollars will do that.)
Troy holds zero bitterness about any of it. If you're spending hundreds of millions on your project, cast it however you want. Will Arnett is hilarious. Meanwhile, to somebody out there, Troy IS their Batman, and he calls that the coolest thing in the world.
Same with Joel. When fans tell him he's the only one who could ever play Joel, his answer is basically: God, I hope not. Imagine if only ONE person could ever play Batman. He thinks Pedro Pascal did a fantastic job in the HBO series. His philosophy on inheriting or passing on a character is my favorite thing he said all episode: do them justice, leave your "smudgy fingerprints" on it, change the character a little, and pass it on. For a brief, shining moment, you got to BE that thing. That's enough.
And he lived it from the other side, too. Troy inherited Indiana Jones from Harrison Ford, the man who once argued nobody else could play Indy. At the 2024 Game Awards, Ford walked out and said, "If I'd known he was so good, I would've done it myself." That's the relay race, done right, in both directions.
Jim's side of this was refreshingly honest. Darkwing Duck is coming back, and Jim isn't in it. "I'm not bitter," he joked. "Okay, a little." But he wished them all the luck in the world, because he wants his buddy to flourish for a new generation. You're allowed to FEEL it. And you can still be gracious. Both things at once.
This lesson is personal for me. On MST3K, I became one of only two performers to play both Crow T. Robot AND Tom Servo in front of live audiences, characters fans had loved for decades in other performers' hands. I've had helped the Muppets come to life for people. Every one of those characters existed before me and will exist after me. My job was to honor them, leave a few smudgy fingerprints, and hand them off to whoever's next.
What I tell my actors: You don't own the role. You BORROW it. Treat it like a priceless heirloom on loan. And if someone else gets the part? Cheer for them out loud. The business is small, memories are long, and raising a stink has never once gotten anybody recast.
Lesson 8: Describe the Personality, Not the Voice
Near the end, Troy asked Jim the question: how did you come up with Darkwing Duck?
Jim's answer is a masterclass in about ninety seconds. Sometimes a production describes the voice they want: higher, lower, this, that. But Jim does better when they describe the PERSONALITY. Darkwing has no powers at all. He's got gadgets, kind of like Batman... except inept. Yet he kind of thinks he's Superman. No villain is too big for him to take on. In Jim's words, he's a "fair to middling size guy" with a "monstrous ego." (Tad Stones created him; Jim calls Darkwing Tad's baby.) Jim just went with the attitude and let it bleed into the performance. There you have it.
Troy's read on WHY it worked is just as valuable. Darkwing was completely unaware of how flawed he was, and Jim never played the joke. He played the guy, sincerely, with all that unearned bravado. That honesty is what made him funny.
There's a bonus moment in the voice swap game, too. When Troy read a line as his Loki (a big, foppish, theatrical take, from before the Tom Hiddleston era), Jim pointed out that Troy's BODY changed with the voice. Troy hadn't even noticed. The attitude showed up in his shoulders before it ever hit the mic.
And early in the episode, Jim put the cherry on top: if the actor is having fun, it translates. It shines through, and it gets the audience on your side.
If you've taken a single session with me, you've heard me say voice acting is not about your voice. This is why. The voice is the LAST thing, the natural result of knowing who the character is, how they see themselves and what they want. Start with the person, let the body follow, and the sound shows up on its own. (Puppetry taught me this first: the soul of the character comes through the arm and hand, THEN the voice.)
Try this: Next time you get character specs that only describe the sound ("gravelly, older, deep"), translate them into personality before you record. Write three things the character believes about themselves. Then stand up, let your body find that attitude, and only THEN open your mouth.
Lesson 9: If You Don't HAVE to Do This, Don't
Troy admitted it's been said so often it's borderline cliché. He said it anyway, because it's true. If you don't HAVE to do this, don't. Not everybody should be a firefighter. Not everybody should be a doctor. But if NOT doing it would make your head explode? Then do it.
One of my legendary coaches and mentors Mick Wingert (look him up) calls it “finding your irreducible minimum.”
Because there WILL be days you hate it. Days it isn't going your way. Long stretches without work, in a business where a huge share of actors are out of work at any given moment. A lot of people who think they want this, he said, actually want success. Or fame. Or money. That's not the same as wanting the WORK.
Troy was honest about what his commitment looked like. When he moved to LA, he made a conscious choice not to take a "real job," because he knew himself and knew a day job would pull him away from what he came to do. There were digging-in-the-couch-for-change days. But he was clear he's not saying everyone should do it his way. (Plenty of working pros, me included, have run a day job alongside the dream for years. The point is knowing YOURSELF and protecting the work, however that looks for you.)
Now let me add a Nate note, because I care about this one deeply: that gut check is YOURS to make. Not a coach's. Not a gatekeeper's. Not some book's.
Jim told a wonderful story about exactly this. A respected director once wrote a book on breaking into show business, with a chapter for every corner of the industry. The voiceover chapter was, essentially, one sentence: voiceover is controlled by a handful of people in Hollywood, where you don't live... so skip to the next chapter. Jim's reaction? Thank goodness he was already working when he read it, or he might have gone back to selling shoes.
I lived a version of that. In New York in the early 2000s, I was told flat out that if I wanted character work or animation, I'd have to move to LA. I couldn't, so I stayed and built my career on commercial VO first. Today I voice animation, games and characters from my own studio for clients all over the world. That verdict was right for its moment, and then the industry moved on without asking its permission.
That's why I will always hand an actor a MAP, never a grade. Is demo readiness real? Absolutely. Does talent matter? Of course. But "where you are" and "where you could be" are two different questions, and nobody gets to answer the second one for you.
What Troy Is NOT Doing
Pin this list above your mic:
He's NOT calling it luck. He's crediting PEOPLE.
He's NOT waiting to be told what he wants. He finds the WHY.
He's NOT twirling a mustache. Every character is the hero of their own story.
He's NOT coasting. If he's bored, he should have said no.
He's NOT hiding in the booth. Body, mind, nature, people.
He's NOT clutching the role. He borrows it, smudges it, and passes it on.
He's NOT throwing a fit when someone else gets cast. He cheers.
Sharpshooters Are Trained, Not Born
Here's what I hope you take from all of this. Troy Baker's level isn't magic, and it sure isn't luck (he'd be the first to tell you). It's a stack of choices, made over and over for decades:
Gratitude for the people who opened doors. Technique forged inside restrictions. A clear WANT under every line. Empathy for every character, even the monsters. A body and mind built for hard things. A voice you can sustain. Humility about who owns the role. And a love for the work so big your head would explode if you didn't do it.
None of that requires a famous name. ALL of it requires training. Sharpshooters don't stumble onto the range. They put in the reps, with someone who can see what they can't. (Twenty-five years in, I still work with my own coaches. That never stops.)
That's what I do in my booth every week. I'm a full-time working talent who coaches when I can, so my 1:1 calendar opens about two weeks out and updates daily. We work inside-out: who the character is, what they want, what they're fighting for... THEN the voice. Animation, games, audiobooks, commercial, dubbing... we'll build your next step as a map, not a grade. And if the director's chair is calling you like it's calling Troy, my Behind the Glass sessions cover directing, casting, ADR, dubbing and production.
Ready to dig in? Grab a time with me here: calendly.com/begleboothstudios/vo-coaching
Not sure yet? Book my free 15-minute chat (you'll find it on my coaching page) and we'll see if we're a fit.
In the meantime, steal my homework. The Approaching series (Animation Characters, Video Game Characters, Commercial VO, and Dubbing and ADR) is ready to download at natebegle.com/voice-acting-resources, and it'll serve you long after any session.
Huge thanks to Jim Cummings, Troy Baker and producer Chris for one of the best craft conversations I've heard all year. Go listen to both parts on Toon'd In! with Jim Cummings, then subscribe. Jim has been raising generations of us for decades, and he's STILL teaching.
PROGRESS NOT PERFECTION. Now go make a choice. (Even if it's ice cream.)
Serious craft. Serious passion. Serious FUN.
Nate Begle is a voice actor, audio producer, writer, director, puppeteer and VO coach.
