If the unspoken ambition of every human being is to make the most money while doing the least amount of work, then try naming a profession that meets the criteria as well as voice-over acting. Where’s the “labor,” really? Someone hands you a piece of paper with some words on it, you step up to a microphone and read them with a little pizzazz, and presto! You’ve just made many thousands of dollars, potentially six figures. And your voice might be heard on commercials or audiobooks or TV for years, during which time you keep getting checks in the mail, all for showing up to read out loud for half an hour.
This perception of voice-over acting—or VO, as people in the biz refer to it — is partly due to the tall tales voice actors tell about their careers. Take Morgan Lavenstein, a local actress who makes her living primarily from VO. Lavenstein is in her mid-30s, has a raspy East Coast voice, and talks like Kirstie Alley if she were from Baltimore; she’s the kind of person you could imagine as a wiseass girl at a Jewish summer camp.
It was 2012, as Lavenstein recalls, and she had just moved to New York City after college to try to make it as an actress. To support herself, she bartended. “I had these regulars who worked right across the street that were commercial editors,” she says. “They’re like four dudes in their 50s. We got along like gangbusters. And they were like, ‘You have a great voice. We should use you on a scratch.’ And I was like, ‘What the hell’s that?’ And they said, ‘It’s like a demo, the first voice that the client hears.’”
Lavenstein recorded the scratch tape — an ad for Glade air fresheners—on her phone while she was on vacation, not thinking much of it. Even though Lavenstein recalls one of the editors describing the recording as “ratchet,” the client, SC Johnson, which makes Glade, loved her voice. After a formal, un-ratchet session at a recording studio, she booked it. “It was a huge, crazy rebranding, a new national campaign,” Lavenstein says. “And I went in all the time. There were several spots, some online, but there were at least four national television spots.”
The Glade campaign ran for two years. “I started getting the checks, and I’ll never forget, my roommate at the time was like, ‘Holy shit, we won the lottery!’” Lavenstein cackles. “He texts me a picture of our entire coffee table covered in checks, from $20 to $5,000.” In all, she estimates that she received $200,000.
Nine years later, Lavenstein semi-regularly performs onstage and on camera (like many local actors, she’s been on Chicago P.D. and Chicago Med), but she draws the closest thing to an annual salary from VO. She’s been the voice of Poise Impressa bladder support devices, the Dyson Lightcycle desk lamp, and Cleveland Clinic. You know that ad for Redd’s apple ale with the tagline “There’s wicked within”? That’s Lavenstein.
If VO were so easy, everyone would do it, of course. And not everyone can. But with every year, more and more people think they can. It’s the fastest-growing minor at Columbia College Chicago, says Deb Doetzer, who teaches in the school’s voice-over program, which is part of its communication department: “It’s skyrocketed.”
Doetzer, who wears azure cat-eye glasses and converses like a supercut of Nickelodeon shows, estimates that of all her students, just 20 to 30 percent go on to do significant work in voice-over. But that proportion doesn’t seem bad, right? Not everybody can look like Timothée Chalamet, move like Jim Carrey, or act like Cate Blanchett. Some people, though, might be able to sound like them. And even though work on video games and animation is centered in L.A. — where the boom in the industry has largely taken place—it’s possible to make a career of VO without leaving town. Chicago has long been a hub of the advertising industry, and the voicing of commercials remains a vibrant enterprise here, making a few people quite rich. Those who know how to work their larynx, that is.
my motives are selfish. While I’ve been told I resemble Tom Hardy (and maybe I could have had a career as his out-of-shape stunt double), it’s my gloriously resonant baritone that I’m more often informed is going to waste. “You know, you have a great voice,” people
