So here’s the thing. The woman I’m writing about today has acted under a total of four names. I know for a fact I’ve heard her while she was using three of them. Given my age, it’s not impossible that I saw her acting in the fourth. In 1989, using her birth name of Erin Grey Van Oosbree, she appeared in a Just Say No short called “Don’t Say Yes When You Really Mean No!” Maybe I saw it. I was probably in elementary school at the time and already ignoring most of the Just Say No stuff they showed us. Still, whether you know her as Grey Griffin, Grey DeLisle, or Grey Griffin-DeLisle, you definitely know the sound of her voice.
She’s been doing voices since high school. She got her original start singing in talent shows, but a friend suggested she get into comedy. She did stand-up for a while; a casting director (I don’t have any names) suggested that she get into voice acting. Which she did. Her mentor was Mary Kay Bergman, from whom she ended up taking over the role of Daphne Blake. She has done some live action work, but she has done voice work in essentially every medium that currently uses it.
As it happens, I don’t like Scooby-Doo. That’s fine; she’s also done Kim Possible and Trollhunters and any number of other things I do enjoy. She’s Samantha Manson on Danny Phantom, a show I like considerably more than its reputation and a character I feel a strong connection to. (Though Sam’s radical vegetarianism irritates the bejeezus out of me.) She is enormously fun these days as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman. The energy she brings to the character is one of the many things that makes that DC Super Hero Girls worth watching, and it is definitely worth watching.
Her own favourite of her characters is apparently Azula, and it’s not difficult to understand why. There’s no nuance to Azula. She’s awful to people because she simply doesn’t care about them. They’re not real to her; they’re either tools or stumbling blocks, and if they’re stumbling blocks, they need to be destroyed. As someone who’s done a little acting, I can tell you that it’s simply fun to play a character like that. You can let yourself go in a way that you otherwise couldn’t. Her performance is more restrained than it could be, because she’s good enough to restrain it just enough.
One of the things I’ve been doing as a parent is teaching my kids about the creation of the media they experience. This includes introducing them to the concept of voice actors. My son gets it a little more than my daughter—she’s five, and I’m not sure she fully understands the concept of “actor.” This may be in part because of how much nonfiction programming I watch; it’s taking her time to understand that Max Miller is a real person but Jim Rockford isn’t. But still, no matter which name you know her by, she’s definitely someone the kids know, and so does pretty much everyone else.
