SpongeBob Voice Actor Tom Kenny Offers Advice For Aspiring Voice Actors

He is the man behind the voices of some of the decade’s most iconic cartoon characters, and he has some advice for aspiring voice actors.

“Don’t do it the way I did it,” Tom Kenny, the voice actor of SpongeBob, the Ice King, and Spyro the Dragon said in a Q & A session last Saturday at the 13 annual ConnectiCon. “Which is, don’t do stand-up and a whole bunch of other stuff for a zillion years and then have somebody ask you ‘Have you ever thought of doing voice over?’”

Kenny’s acting career began when he was 16, when he answered an ad in his local paper to do standup. The ad was posted by comic Barry Crimmins, whom Kenny describes as one of the most important people in his early life.

“For me, it wasn’t so much iconic roles for me than iconic people in my life that have been supportive of me,” he said. “Joe Murray, the creator of ‘Rocko’s Modern Life,’ Genndy Tartakovsky, Craig McCracken, you know … Pendelton Ward, Steve Hillenburg, the SpongeBob creator … each one of those has helped kept me working all these years.”

According to Kenny, there is no magic bullet into getting a voice acting career. He suggests that aspiring voice actors build up a “repertoire of voices and accents” that are really theirs, not just copies of ones that exist, though imitation is useful when auditioning for roles where the original actor have passed on.  

“What catches people’s attention is when you audition as a voice that they weren’t expecting,” Kenny describes. “Which means to do that, you have to be in a position where people are hearing your auditions, which kind of means you have to go to a place where there’s animation like New York or Los Angeles. If you’re not comfortable living there, I think it’s tougher for you.”

Kenny takes great pride in his work, especially his ability to make people laugh.

“It just makes me happy,” he said. “You know, you do your job and then the byproduct of it is that you put funny stuff out into the world that makes people smile for a minute or two. And then they grow up and they still love it.”

Kenny is a high-demand voice over, usually committing to 8 or 9 shows at a time. Some he describes as “staples,” such as “SpongeBob” or “Adventure Times” that have been around for a while, while others are up in the air. Currently, Kenny is working on “SpongeBob,” “Adventure Time,” “Clarence,” “Miles from Tommorowland,” “The Powerpuff Girls,” “Ultimate Spider-man,” ”Talking Tom and Friends,” “Teen Titans Go!,” as well as miscellaneous projects.

ConnectiCon is New England’s only massively multi-genre pop culture convention, and draws in over 12,000 people annually. It is run by volunteers through ConnectiCon LLC, and won a 2011 Greater Hartford Convention and Visitor’s Bureau Bring It Home award, for the tourist revenue it brought to the city. According to The Hartford Business Journal, 1,000 hotel rooms are needed for the event. 

Here is the full Q & A session: