From the outside looking in, the world of voice acting holds an allure that seems glamorous in a different way than traditional acting. There's no wardrobe to fit, no hair and makeup to arrange, no far-off location to travel to, and so forth. All an actor has to do is show up and speak into a microphone. According to the lead voices behind "Gnomeo and Juliet" (an animated take on Shakespeare's classic), James McAvoy and Emily Blunt, there are indeed a few benefits.
But it's definitely not as basic as some might think. MTV News recently spoke to Blunt and McAvoy, who told us effective voice work requires a few tricks.
"I feel like you have to overact the entire time because you don't realize how flat your voice sounds when it's faceless and expressionless," Blunt said. "So you actually have to over-enunciate and really leap around to add some kind of liveliness to the way you speak," she explained. "It was interesting. We were told often to smile while we were talking because it actually lightens your voice up. It was interesting."
McAvoy added that you can actually hear the smile in the voice. "It was quite interesting. Even when the character is not supposed to be smiling, they'd like to hear the smile," he said.
Blunt also revealed that a few of her scenes were a bit embarrassing because she had to run in place in order to act out certain action sequences.
"They need reactions from you falling on something or swinging or grabbing a hold of something," she explained. "So that's when you have to emanate every kind of sound you can ever muster up. It's very strange."
Check out everything we've got on "Gnomeo and Juliet."
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