Bruins gone WILD

Miles Marsico and Jack De Sena met in the wild.

The first-year acting students in the UCLA School of Theater,
Film and Television were both voice actors in the latest Disney
animated movie “The Wild” (Marsico as Duke the kangaroo
and De Sena as Eze the hippo), jobs that were not easy to land.

“Some actors are really talented but when you don’t
have the hair, makeup, camera, lights and a co-star next you,
it’s really hard to act. When you’re doing voices
it’s a very pure kind of acting. You don’t have
anything external to make your performance great,” said Jen
Rudin Pearson, head of casting for Walt Disney Feature Animation.
“We auditioned tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of
teenage boys. Tons. So they really beat out a lot of
people.”

They auditioned separately several times before they were paired
together. As Rudin Pearson explained, although the writer or
director may have an idea for what a character should sound like,
it is hard to define exactly what type of voice is right until they
hear it.

To find skilled voices, Rudin Pearson often recruits theater
actors for their vocal endurance and comedians for their ability to
make words exciting, and will fly across the country to conduct
casting calls.

“Pretty much I’m always looking for an interesting
voice to come out of the animal. … (Duke and Eze) were supposed
to be the really dumb guy friends to the main guy so we were
looking for like “˜the funny friends,'” Rudin
Pearson said. “Jack just put on sort of a dumb guy voice that
really worked for that big (hippo). Miles had a little lisp and a
sweet voice and he was higher pitched, and Jack was lower so they
made a really good team because they sounded different.”

Their characters were an on-screen duo ““ they were
together in most scenes and though they acted the parts of friends,
they did not really become friends themselves until they came to
campus.

“We were friendly working on “˜The Wild’ but we
didn’t really know each other well. And then we kind of
figured out toward the end that we were both coming (to
UCLA),” De Sena said. “It was very weird and very cool
to have someone who I had been working with for two years kind of
just pop up in my classes. … We definitely hang out a lot more
now than we did in two years of work.”

They began recording for “The Wild” over two years
ago because the main voices needed to be recorded before the main
animation could begin. But every few months, they would get called
back in to try lines a new way.

The film was released this April and they were making trips to
the studio to re-record up until December.

“It was only two or three months before the movie came
out. By then we were all set and we had already been hanging out,
so when we went to work that time it was a lot looser vibe,”
De Sena said. “You’re standing there with a script
““ you don’t need to memorize anything. And you’re
just reading and playing and trying it all sorts of different ways.
It’s a very loose environment and just a lot of
fun.”

Recording together not only made the experience more fun, but it
allowed the actors to play off of each other and improvise some
lines.

“Usually when you record it separately there’s not
so much improv,” Marsico said. “They let us spice it up
a little bit: some “˜hey dudes’ and “˜yo man’
and some little asides like that.”

To capture authentic speech rhythms and up-to-date slang, Rudin
Pearson likes to cast voice actors who are roughly the same age as
their characters for Disney movies ““ Marsico and De Sena fit
the profile of teenagers.

But especially in young voice acting, where a middle-aged woman
can voice a 10-year-old boy, identifying exactly with the character
is a detail that can usually be fudged, if not overlooked
entirely.

Marsico and De Sena can audition for roles they simply would not
fit were they live action parts. Sounding different than you look
can sometimes be an advantage, especially for teenage boys.

“Both Miles and Jack are able to artificially sound like
they have that puberty thing going on, to do the crack,” said
Melissa Berger, Marsico and De Sena’s agent, who specializes
in young talent. “I’ll read them for everything from 14
to 20, 21.”

But not all voice roles are for humans, and while casting a role
of a certain age can be difficult, it can be harder to cast a role
or pinpoint the problem with a voice when there are fewer
expectations of what it should sound like.

“Somebody would be doing a really nice job but he
doesn’t sound like he should be coming out of the
turtle,” Berger said. “Can we imagine this voice coming
out of the kangaroo?”

Marsico and De Sena each had voice acting experience prior to
landing the Disney roles, though this was the first time either of
them had voiced a feature film.

Marsico has been voice acting in television and commercials
since he was around 9 years old. While De Sena was in high school,
he was a regular cast member on the Nickelodeon variety show
“All That,” which gave him the opportunity to
experiment with voices and characters and develop a method for
finding a voice.

“Usually I just look at what’s the age, what’s
a quick couple of adjectives to use to describe it, and then find
somewhere to place it. If it’s an alien or something then
I’ve got to mess around with it and find some sort of other
voice,” De Sena said. “I’ve always played around
with different voices in my head. A lot of voices are spins on
stuff I’ve heard before and combining elements and adding new
things.”

Marsico and De Sena both continue to work during the school
year. As full-time students, they have found it is easier to
maintain a career as voice actors than as on-camera actors and the
majority of their work right now is in voice acting.

De Sena is the voice of the older brother on the Nickelodeon
cartoon “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” And Marsico is in
a series of Apple Jacks commercials.

“It takes like 15 or 20 minutes, half an hour at the most
for Apple Jacks. I can schedule it anytime between classes or in
the morning before classes and be done with it until they call me
again. It’s never gotten in the way of anything,”
Marsico said.

“(On-camera acting) would be impossible because they have
an entire crew and a shooting schedule and they basically tell you
“˜you’re here from this day to this day and make sure
you clear your schedule.’ It depends on the project, but one
episode of a television show would just take a week of being there
on the set, which would be really hard to work around,” he
added. “Movies take months, you know, so forget
that.”

But quick, individual recording sessions can mean missing out on
some of the perks of working in Hollywood.

William Shatner, Janeane Garofalo and Eddie Izzard, among
others, voiced characters in “The Wild,” but since
their characters were not in the same scenes as Marsico’s and
De Sena’s, they’ve never actually worked together. For
voice acting, one has to forgo the chance to really bond with a
cast and a crew.

“I’m a really big Eddie Izzard fan and unfortunately
I never got to meet him,” De Sena said. “There was one
time where I was there early for my call and William Shatner was
there. I never had any scenes with him so I never got to work with
him. To just pop in early and sit and listen to him was a lot of
fun, and you know, a learning experience and all.”

The job opportunities for voice actors are not limited to film
and television, and can include recording sounds for toys, radio
commercials, background conversation and, increasingly, video
games.

De Sena recorded his voice for a video game version of
“Avatar” and found it much the same as any other
job.

“Most of the dialogue I had to perform was basically like
a cartoon stuck in the beginning of the game,” said De Sena.
“For the actual playable portion it was just recording a lot
of different ways of saying “˜ow’ and a lot of different
ways of saying “˜look out.'”

But no matter the medium, the craft demands respect.

“That is a prejudice that I hate ““ that voice-over
acting is easier than (on-camera acting),” Berger said.
“The microphone picks up everything, they can tell if you
don’t know what you’re saying.”

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