For Mara Wilson, who performed the plucky schoolgirl heroine within the 1996 movie adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “Matilda,” audiobook roles scratch her appearing itch whereas enabling her to qualify for SAG-AFTRA medical insurance. “And I don’t must take care of the nonsense and scrutiny of Hollywood. I really feel like they don’t know what to do with somebody of their 30s, Jewish and LGBTQ,” says the Los Angeles actor, who has narrated some 60 titles during the last 4 years and received a 2025 Audie (the Oscars of audiobooks).
“I can play a queer tattooed ex-punk nun,” she says of the roles accessible, “be a demon, a fairy, an outdated lady, a little bit woman, a assassin, a sufferer or either side of a love affair.”
Bronson Pinchot — the grasp of accents recognized for scene-stealing turns as Serge within the “Beverly Hills Cop” movie franchise, Balki in ABC’s “Excellent Strangers” and the chef Didier on Netflix’s “The Residence” — has tackled an excellent larger number of roles, having voiced greater than 450 audiobooks to this point. Recording from his dwelling in Pasadena, he has performed women and men of all ages, races, nationalities and skills, in addition to “postapocalyptic folks dwelling in timber and empresses of fictitious planets,” he notes.
Regardless of the guide or its characters, Pinchot says, “it’s the one performative artwork the place an actor can focus extra on the narrative intention than their very own gender and ethnicity.”
The pair are simply two of the various actors vying for audiobook roles at a time when the expertise pool is increasing and casting is changing into a rising subject of debate. U.S. audiobook gross sales revenues grew 13% to $2.2 billion in 2024, in accordance with the Audio Publishers Assn., rivaling and in some circumstances surpassing e-books in reputation.
“Audiobooks are the darlings of publishing,” says Robin Whitten, founding father of AudioFile journal, which critiques narrator performances. “Listeners who discover a voice they like will hearken to books they hadn’t thought-about earlier than as a result of they need that narrator to inform them a narrative.”
However this bounty isn’t shared by all. Performers corresponding to Julia Whelan, a former little one actor and writer of “My Oxford Yr,” and Edoardo Ballerini, who performed Corky Caporale on “The Sopranos,” have developed sturdy audiobook careers and entrepreneurial offshoots — in 2024, Whelan based Audiobrary, a publishing firm that pays royalties to narrators and distributes titles together with Ballerini’s personal productions of public area classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Most audiobook actors, nevertheless, face a mess of challenges: The wages are decrease than different voice gigs; they might be paid, as an example, between $2,000 and $6,000 for a guide with a 10-hour listening time, irrespective of what number of hours it takes to file. They face elevated competitors from SAG-AFTRA members, non-union and even newbie performers who might examine desired demographic bins. And household-name-famous actors are additionally getting into the business in multi-cast productions corresponding to Audible’s upcoming Harry Potter sequence with Hugh Laurie, Matthew Macfadyen and Riz Ahmed, due in November.
Worst by far, for the journeyman performer, is the looming specter of AI-generated narration.
“Proper now AI sounds synthetic,” says David Aaron Baker, who has narrated works by sci-fi masters Ray Bradbury and Philip Ok. Dick. “You possibly can inform it’s a robotic.”
Advances in dwelling recording know-how together with COVID-19 shutdowns and the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike (from which audiobook work was exempt) spurred narrators and wannabes to arrange dwelling studios. This decreased prices for manufacturing firms whereas saddling actors with overhead and the necessity to engineer and direct their very own recordings. (The educational curve, says actor Bahni Turpin, “gave me so many complications and meltdowns.”) Regardless of this, the variety of performers has grown exponentially bigger, extra geographically dispersed and extra numerous. In consequence, publishers and authors now have a larger means to forged genuine voices, creating each alternatives and limitations for narrators.
“We at all times try to forged voices that mirror the ethnicity, race and sexuality of the principle character or the writer,” says Jeff Tabnick, head casting director at Recorded Books, which produces 1,200 titles every year and is the one main manufacturing firm that provides residuals to audiobook narrators. “And if the textual content doesn’t appear to want a particular race or ethnicity, we contemplate folks from all races and ethnicities.”
Turpin, a Black actor who narrated “The Assist” and “The Hate U Give,” has labored virtually solely on tasks with Black authors and protagonists in her 20-year audiobook profession along with appearing with the Cornerstone Theater Firm in Los Angeles and showing on “NCIS.” “I’ve completed a sequence of books by Stacia Kane,” she recollects as an exception, “the place the lead character was a white witch.”
Black actor Dominic Hoffman, in the meantime, voiced the white character of Huckleberry Finn and Jim, the Black protagonist, for Percival Everett’s “James,” profitable an Audie and an L.A. Instances Pageant of Books prize for his narration, and beforehand portrayed Japanese European Jewish, Italian and Black characters for the audiobook recording of James McBride’s “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Retailer,” a interval novel. “Black individuals are extra expert at crossing that divide just because we reside and wholly perform in a white world,” contends Hoffman, the writer of “Late Rehearsals,” a narrative assortment out this fall. “We’re adept at talking like them and navigating their tradition.”
Born in West Virginia to Indonesian and Chinese language immigrant mother and father, actor Nancy Wu, who is understood for narrating the “X-Males: Mutant Empire” and the “Avatar: The Final Airbender” sequence, started working as a narrator throughout an period when, she says, “I might voice every kind of characters I’d by no means be capable to play visually: the main girl, the evil spirit king, a 6-foot-tall, blue-eyed, blonde vampire queen. It was very liberating.”
Lately, nevertheless, she has noticed that casting has change into extra complicated and particular. “The business apprehensive about getting ethnicity ‘mistaken’ and commenced to get extraordinarily particular with id casting,” Wu explains. “However the hazard is that when casting turns into too granular, actors threat getting more and more pigeonholed.”
Deepti Gupta, a 2022 Audie greatest feminine narrator winner for “The Parted Earth” by Anjali Enjeti and a recurring actor on the medical drama “The Pitt,” says casting generally is a “bizarre Catch-22. On one hand we would like specificity, however that may make actors really feel stereotyped.” The Delhi-born, L.A.-based actor provides that she is aware of narrators “who don’t put their images on-line on goal or use a reputation with out ethnicity to have the ability to do greater than what the business thinks they will.”
“Ninety p.c of my audiobook work relies on my final identify,” observes Thom Rivera, who has narrated works by Gabriel García Márquez, Guillermo del Toro and Michael Nava. “There’s an assumption that with a Latino identify, I communicate Spanish fluently, however I’m not a local speaker,” says the actor, who educated in Shakespeare and the classics at Cal State Northridge and UC Irvine. “If a guide is culturally particular, it’s essential that there’s bone-deep expertise. If I’m not proper culturally, it ought to go to another person. If it’s a guide about an American, I’m an American, and I don’t suppose that ought to matter that I’m Chicano. However generally it does.”
Shoppers and on-line critiques additionally play a task in casting. “At first, audiobooks have been principally recorded by about 100 to 200 Caucasian stage actors who voiced all of the books, all of the ethnicities and accents. And most have been males,” says Debra Deyan, founding father of the Deyan Institute in Northridge, which provides programs on audiobook narration. “Now, with greater than 10,000 often working narrators, audiobooks are on the peak of range casting, however the product can now not be for the ear and the creativeness alone. The actor’s look, private info, social media and politics are additionally in play.”
Age can usually play a decisive function. “The business is at all times on the lookout for younger, new expertise,” says Eliza Foss, a New York-based actor and director who additionally teaches audiobook narration at universities. “I’m up towards two issues now — AI and ageism. Being typecast is an industrywide subject, however I did hope that wouldn’t be the case with audiobook narration for the reason that voice is so versatile.”
Emily Lawrence, a profession narrator of greater than 600 books since 2012 and co-founder of the Skilled Audiobook Narrators Assn., notes that “you’ll be able to completely hear age. Age and gender presentation are in all probability the components all narrators are restricted by indirectly.”
Actor-writer-producer Shaan Dasani, an Indian American transgender man who has appeared in “Legal Minds: Past Borders,” started narrating audiobooks in 2021 and notes a key distinction between voice work and onscreen roles. “Narrating audiobooks, I’ve been in a position to play quite a lot of age ranges, genders, sizes and skills,” he says. “My voice lends itself to youthful protagonists, so in that manner there’s typecasting. However lower than half of the titles I’ve narrated have protagonists which can be trans, and solely three have characters who’re South Asian.
“There’s extra of an open thoughts in relation to casting within the audiobook world,” he concludes. “Audiences are far more savvy right now, so we will’t preserve telling tales in the identical manner. And we can also’t be afraid to stumble.”
Reflecting on the lengthy hours he spends alo ne within the recording sales space, Pinchot, the Pasadena voice actor, describes the accountability he feels to get it proper for each authors and listeners in suitably literary phrases. “As narrator and all of the characters, one is holding the complete fictive universe like Atlas,” he says. “It’s essentially the most troublesome job in all of present enterprise.”
