I remember seeing 'Aladdin' when I was five or six and loving it. I looked at the big screen and said to my mum, 'Whatever this Genie guy does, I want to do.' Mum said I couldn't be a genie, but that Robin Williams, who did the voice-over in the film, was an actor. So I said, 'OK, then, I want to be an actor.'
Whenever you do an animated project or a voice-over project it's inevitable that part of your personality comes into play.
The beauty of voice-over work is that maybe you come in and record once every two weeks for a couple of hours and do a couple episodes a session. It's awesome! You spend an afternoon playing in the booth, and there you have it. It doesn't interfere with much.
And in a world without heroes, as the movie trailer voice-over guy might say, the slightly awkward can be slightly cool.
Definitely in voice-over, you have to be completely uninhibited. More than that, you have to put yourself back into the enjoyment of pretending.
Really, voice-over is great. If it paid as much as on camera work, it's all I'd ever do.
Unlike other voice-over situations which are done in a recording studio, Roger Rabbit was live action and animation combined, and there was a time factor, so my voice was recorded live on the set. So I'm on the set rehearsing and recording my voice as a performance with the other actors, and they're all wearing costumes, and it made sense to me.
I had never really done voice-over. If you've ever seen me, I'm more the communicator through body language and movement... I'm a physical actor.
With voice-over, you have to pretend like you're three, except you can talk and read.
It really depends, but, generally speaking, just because of the mechanics of it, voice-over is easier because there is no hair, no makeup, no wardrobe, no fittings, no line memorizing. You don't have to me woken up in Russia at 6 in the morning and go film a scene. It's just easier on the body, the family life to do voice-overs.