The prolific voice actor shares his thoughts on moving from animation production to voice work, learning how to ‘act’ rather than just ‘do’ voices, and professing a lifelong love of Marvin the Martian.
Though most voice actors begin their careers on the theatrical stage or behind the mic voicing for about a dozen background characters in indie TV series, Eric Bauza took a different approach, practicing his impressions while working hard as a layout artist for well-known 2D animations like The Brave Little Toaster and Ren & Stimpy.
“I was responsible for drawing, from the storyboard, poses to be animated further down the line, which is a luxury to have on a television production these days,” notes Bauza. “I was often in the bullpen area where all the animators were, and it was a great atmosphere. You're all on your computers on chat together, sending people stupid videos all the time. I was also the guy in the animation studio that was always doing impressions and voices with everyone else going, ‘I wish this guy would just shut up and do his work.’ But I miss those days. I really do.”
This was back in the 90s and early 2000s. Today, Bauza is an Emmy Award-winning voice actor, recognized for his work on Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai, Teen Titans Go!, Kiff, Stillwater, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bugs Bunny Builders, Rick and Morty, The Mighty Ones, Inside Job, and Looney Tunes Cartoons, for which the Mel Blanc successor won the first ever Children's and Family Emmy Award for Outstanding Voice Performance in an Animated Program.
“I only ever auditioned for Bugs Bunny twice in a decade, which goes to show you how often they open it up,” says Bauza, currently the voice for many Tunes characters, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Marvin the Martian, Pepé Le Pew, Tweety, and Speedy Gonzales. “The first time, I did not get the part of Bugs, but they cast me as Marvin the Martian. Isn't that lovely? Then, a decade later, they create these shorts, and they give me that opportunity with Bugs, Daffy, and Tweety.”
Bauza’s most recent voice role was on Travis Braun’s Disney Junior series, Pupstruction, releasing Wednesday, June 14 on Disney+. The series follows a team of innovative canines as they work together to build solutions to everyday problems in their city of Petsburg.
“I play the dad, Harry, which is kind of like my regular voice but a little bit warmer,” explains Bauza. “And Lloyd, Mayor Gilmore’s assistant, who is always yes-ma’am-ing. Then there’s Sniff, who is the most lovable bad guy you could ever have. I’ve played lovable idiots before, where the lights are on, but no one is home. So, to find a unique version of that kind of character with Sniff was a lot of fun.”
Bauza had actually met Braun during his time on the DreamWorks 2013 series Turbo FAST, channeling his Paul Giamatti voice alongside Reid Scott, who was the Ryan Reynolds voice match. Titmouse, where Braun worked at the time, was hired on for the series animation.
“Travis was working at Titmouse doing script coordinating and was just the happiest guy to be there,” remembers Bauza, who also worked with Braun on T.O.T.S. alongside Victor Cook and Collette Sunderman. “I was always like, ‘What’s up with this guy? He's always got a smile on his face, he's always running marathons… I need to get on his diet. It's so cool to see Travis go from this happy-go-lucky guy to one of Disney Junior’s top creators. This guy is their lightning in a bottle, and I hope that this series lasts a long time and works out well for the whole team.”
Bauza had another recent reunion with an old animation friend while voicing Toad General on The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
“Six Point Harness was the last studio I worked at as a layout artist and I remember, about six rows, or six seats down from me, was this guy, Aaron Horvath,” shares Bauza. “We used to just goof around all the time. And this is 2006. I never thought this guy would be the one to direct The Super Mario Bros. Movie. You're goofing around with your dumb friends and making dumb jokes. And then this guy is now responsible for a movie that made $1 billion in 26 days.”
Six Point was a special place, not only in how it fostered community and relationships among artists, but also in how it allowed Bauza to work as a visual artist while also allowing him to audition and moonlight as a voice actor.
“Eventually, the voice acting work started to outweigh the drawing work and I knew I had to let one of those things go,” says Bauza. “I never thought that I would be doing this as long as I have. I couldn't be happier with the people I’ve met in this career, and with who I'm still friends amidst all the changes and expansions this industry has gone through. I probably should have said this in my Emmy speech, but as I was looking out to the crowd and the audience, I realized I had so many people in that room and just across the board to thank for their trust.”
For as much fun as Bauza had goofing off with friends in the trenches of animation production, he says he learned the hard way how different the world of voice acting was and that funny voices weren’t enough to get you through the doors. It took a handful of legends to teach Bauza how to act in a way that both entertained and moved people.
“What gets you through that door and allows you to stay in the room is the good acting, and I was awful in the beginning,” admits Bauza. “You have to ground these characters. Even if you are a cartoon dog dad on a preschool show about canine construction, you have to ground it in some kind of reality.”
Bauza says the gig that really changed the game for him was on Joaquim Dos Santos’ G.I. Joe: Resolute, where he acted alongside Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Grey DeLisle (Griffin), Cowboy Bebop’s Steve Blum, and DuckTales’ Charlie Adler.
“It was right after working with Charlie and Grey on El Tigre,” notes Bauza. “It was like it was Hasbro's first attempt at G.I. Joe for ages 14 and up, so there weren't lasers, there were real bullets. People died, there was blood, and it was real. One of the notes I got back from the voice director was, ‘He's a nice guy but his acting is a little… meh.’”
He continues, “But they trusted me to see it through, and that voice director and I worked together multiple times after that. I also remember working with Andrea Romano, who was the voice director on El Tigre, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and who was behind so many of the Batman cartoon series. She told me, ‘I don't know what happened to you but, in two years, you figured it out. You found the switch and you turned it on.’ And it was all thanks to being around these great people.”
Bauza got to explore another serious and dark side to animated storytelling and acting when he was cast as Nuno the Snitch in Netflix’s Trese.
“I'm of Filipino descent - even though I'm 100 percent Canadian Tour Guide - but Trese was like Filipino X Files with all this cool folklore and myths and their versions of monsters like Bigfoot,” says Bauza. “It was very beautifully done. I always am amazed that, aside from all the children's programming I get to be a part of, that I get to have fun in this Adult Swim area of animation.”
The range of Bauza’s voice acting is impressive; he manages to perform over 21 different Beagle Boys voices for DuckTales, dive into the Marvel universe as Adam Warlock in the animated series Guardians of the Galaxy, and take on Amadeus Cho in Ultimate Spider-Man.
“Also, a big shout out to Rob Cantor for making my having to sing in these crazy voices so easy,” inserts Bauza. “On T.O.T.S., I was Mr. Woodbird and he had a rival who was a peacock, who I also voiced, and I had to sing against myself in a very competitive song.”
Over the last two decades, the actor has been all over the map, stretching and strengthening his voicing talents well past the days of doing impressions of Marge Simpson in his studio illustrator cubical. But, since the birth of his son in 2016, Bauza says he’s found an unexpected home in preschool series, such as Pupstruction, Princess Power, and Young Jedi Adventures.
“I could not book a preschool show to save my life before my son was born, and then suddenly, the only thing I can book are preschool shows and I don’t mind,” says Bauza. “If I only ever do preschool shows for the rest of my career, I'll be fine. They are so much fun. The atmosphere is always really upbeat and light. There are some stakes and there are some problems that need to be solved. But I always feel like it is so much more fun than some adult shows I’ve been on.”
He adds, “My son and I watch Kiff together, enjoying my Reggie, Mr. Rippeppa, and Roy Fox, aka my Will Arnett rip-off voice. My son also has this great ear for voices that he inherited from me, and he’ll watch shows I forgot I was in and I’ll be in the other room making lunch when I hear him say, “Hey! I just heard you in a cartoon again!” I think the latest one was Fast & Furious Spy Racers, and I was doing this really bad German accent and my son totally knew it was me.”
It also helps that the boy’s mother is Jessica Lynn Borutski, animation director on The Loud House for Nickelodeon.
“We’re not together anymore and, fun fact, we were never married,” notes Bauza. “But people seem to really want us to be together, because we’ll Google our names, and it will say that we’re married. It’s been awful for our dating lives. We laugh about it though because we’ll change it on Wikipedia and then someone else will change it back a week later with an exact date of our alleged marriage. In fact, if you can’t make this the headline of your article, maybe find a way to slip in this PSA.”
Suffice to say, the animation industry and its creatives are all part of an interconnected community where if two people haven’t crossed paths yet, it’s a near certainty they will. And, in Bauza’s experience, lives are enriched, and families are made because of it.
“These guys, I talk about them like they’re family members because we've been working together for so long, or because I’ve admired them for even longer,” he shares. “John DiMaggio, Rob Paulsen, Jeff Bennett, all these all these people that I grew up watching on TV, I started learning from them in the booth. Then there’s Grey during my time on El Tigre and Gremlins, Tara Strong on Agent Elvis, as well as Yvette Nicole Brown and Kari Wahlgren on Pupstruction. If you were to do a Mount Rushmore with all the heads of the voice actors that should be on that mountain, they’d all be up there in my opinion.”
When he first started booking voice gigs, Bauza says his agent asked what the actor’s ultimate goal was for the future, and he told her that he wanted to be in the top 10 men and women who work in animation.
“I think I’ve just about gotten there, but in my mind, I'm still sitting in my seat going ‘Oh, Mark Hamill won again,’” shares Bauza. “That was the funniest Emmys. It was the stay-at-home over Zoom Emmys where you’re in half tuxedo half basketball shorts. Mark Hamill and I were both nominated, him for Elena of Avalor, me for Muppet Babies… I think. And I don’t know if the other nominees couldn’t make it or what but, for some odd reason, it was just me and Mark on camera. Of course, Mark wins, but before I can clap for him, my window disappeared, and I was kicked out of the Zoom room. So, I’m sitting there in my basketball shorts looking at a blank screen in silence. It was the funniest and most depressing scene. It’s like, ‘Might as well go to In-and-Out and drown my sorrows.’
But there have been plenty of Kodak moments, outside of the “Pandemmys” when Bauza felt he’d done his younger self proud.
“I don't know if you believe in the cosmos and the universe talking to you, but I’ll leave you with this,” says Bauza as he pulls out his phone. “This is something I’d posted for WB’s 100th anniversary. The first picture is from 1992, when I visited California around age 12, and I went to Six Flags wearing a giant Marvin the Martian t-shirt. I took a picture with a Silvester mascot and then again in the same location, during the pandemic. LeBron James thought, ‘Hey, why don't we have a party for Space Jam at Six Flags?’ As soon as I saw the Silvester mascot, I knew I had to take this photo again.”
He continues, “I did the same thing at Universal Studios, where I took the same picture with Woody Woodpecker that I took back when I was a kid, probably during that same year. It’s been a kind of serendipitous career that I've had. Again, I’ve got no one to thank but everyone.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
