Before he was Sonic and Ezio, Smith was a fledgling stand-up comedian with funny voices.
The Big Picture
- Stand-up comedy failure led Roger Craig Smith to lucrative voice acting career, despite initial reluctance.
- Smith used voices and characters in his routine, which proved to be the standout.
- Nowadays, he’s known for voicing Sonic the Hedgehog and Ezio in the
Assassin’s Creed
games.
Roger Craig Smith wasn’t always destined to be the prolific voiceover artist he is today. Before becoming the man behind beloved video game icons like Sonic the Hedgehog and Assassin’s Creed‘s Ezio Auditore da Firenze or taking on film and television roles from Avengers Assemble to Planes, he had hopes of making it in the world of stand-up comedy. However, by his own account, he wasn’t particularly good at it. Although he wasn’t going to make it big performing sets, he revealed during a panel hosted by Collider’s Perri Nemiroff at Fan Expo in Calgary that bombing as a comic was what ultimately pushed him to pursue a career in voice acting.
Smith wasn’t just interested in comedy. In college, he also studied screenwriting and graduated with a degree in that field before pursuing stand-up. Despite his passion for both, however, he detailed to the crowd that everything seemed to be pointing him to voice acting, where he’d inevitably find far greater success. “So the funny part is that, because I’ve had people say like, ‘What was the turning point in your career, having this happen to you,’ and I go ‘by being a really bad stand-up comic,'” he said.
One of his biggest challenges early on, he revealed, was nailing down his voice as a comic. With some help from his old high school theater arts teacher, Smith found a style that best utilized his strengths with silly voices and characters while unknowingly preparing himself for a future of voicing everything from blue hedgehogs to Batman. He recounted the instructor’s criticism of his work and how she pushed him to embrace the Robin Williams style of comedy he’d leaned on before arriving at college, saying:
“I was literally doing stand-up comedy, sort of before, during, and after college. Briefly after college. But I was doing voices and characters in the act, on the advice of my high school theater arts instructor who, when I was considering getting into stand-up, I called her and said, ‘hey, I’m thinking about doing this and nobody knows me better than you.’ And I said, ‘I wanna run some material by you.’ So literally, I met her back at my old high school after school was done, went to the little theater, and in front of just my high school theater arts instructor, I did my set, and we get done and – this is why she’s the best – she just goes ‘ok.’ She’s like ‘Why are you not doing any voices and characters in there? And I was like ‘oh’ and she goes ‘Yeah, you’re just doing observational stand-up comedy, and that’s fine, but anybody can do that.’ And she goes ‘you were always like Robin Williams, you’re always doing weird little characters and you have all this energy. You should channel those and make the comedy where we laugh with you as you find a character as opposed to just doing observational stuff.
Smith Was Given a Humbling Moment That Changed His Career Forever
Alas, reworking his entire routine wasn’t without its faults. While he believes that her advice was sound, and it ultimately helped prepare him for a future in recording booths, it didn’t satisfy a demand within the comedy space. He continued, “So then I started rewriting all the material. When I started doing that, it was more like making little characters and things like that. And despite her brilliance in suggesting that, it wasn’t like the industry was saying like, ‘Oh, hey, you’re really good at stand-up. When are you gonna perform stand-up again?’” The moment that finally made him realize that stand-up was the wrong path required a bit of build-up of comments about his voice and routine being out of place until he earned a scathing remark while auditioning for the Aspen Comedy Festival:
“I kept hearing people go like, ‘oh, you have like a radio voice.’ ‘Are you a radio guy,’ or ‘you must do cartoons, right? You do all these characters and voices.’ And then finally we were trying out for the Aspen Comedy Festival at the Improv in Irvine. And by then I’d been doing it for about maybe three or four years and I think her name is Judy Brown. I think. Julia Brown? Judy Brown? She was there to evaluate ten of us that were performing that night. The audience leaves, we go back on stage and she critiques us in front of our peers because, you know, she’s giving all sorts of notes about comedy. She gets to me, and she goes, ‘Who represents you for voiceover?’ And I’m like, ‘nobody.’ And she goes, ‘Huh, you should really look into that,’ and then moved on and said nothing about my stand-up.”
While it likely stung at the time, Smith took the criticism to heart and saw this as his moment to explore an avenue that had been calling to him for a while. “I was like, OK, there’s the industry telling me like, I’ve gotta bark up a different tree, and I was like, OK, so, I went and then, at that point, started googling, you know, ‘What is voiceover?’ ‘How does somebody become a voice actor?’ So I credit being a marginal-to-bad stand-up comic with launching my voiceover career,” he told the crowd. That decision led him down a fulfilling path that most recently featured the smash-hit Starship Troopers-adjacent video game Helldivers II and the Sterling K. Brown-led children’s series Interrupting Chicken, with a small part in Netflix’s Thelma the Unicorn on the horizon.
“And then I got in and started doing voiceover, and it was like my gosh, between screenwriting, stand-up comedy, musical theater as a kid, drums, all this, it was like the perfect blend of everything that I had enjoyed doing up until that point. And it paid, unlike stand-up comedy. Suddenly somebody would say, you know, ‘Thank you for doing all these noises, here’s a check.’ And I was like, ‘Wow! That’s how this works?’ So at that point, I was like, yeah, I’m gonna do this, and I had a screenplay in development after college, right at the time that my voiceover career was starting to kind of pop. And I remember just kind of going, ‘ok, screenwriting is a passion. I love it, but it’s a lot of work, and it’s a lot of hours,’ and voiceover was paying. I just thought, ‘I think I wanna bark up that tree.’ And now 20 years into it at this point, I’m like, all right, I think I made a good choice.”
Stay tuned here at Collider for more coverage from Fan Expo in Calgary.
This article was originally published on collider.com