INTERVIEW: From Early 90's 'Sailor Moon' to Modern-Day Netflix - What We Can Learn From the Long and Steady Career of Voice Actress Amanda Céline Miller

Interview with Amanda Céline Miller

Oct 28, 2019

Hey Hey!!

“This kind does not come out except by prayer and fasting." - Matthew 17:21 Throughout life, without knowing it, we can sometimes acquire traits that do not belong to us. But lucky for us, God has given us the gift of fasting so that we can separate ourselves from the unnecessary clutter that keeps others from seeing who we truly are. Sometimes the clutter centers itself around food, but it can also center itself around other unhealthy habits that we have unknowingly picked up in life. As we look in the scriptures, we are aware that fasting is apart of God's refining process and that He does not expect us to go through this alone, He brings in others who He has trained up to help guide us through the process. This week, my Pastor said "If we are going to be set free, it is going to be through fasting.". Although it can sometimes be very challenging and uncomfortable to breakaway from what we know - may we all eventually get to a point that (for both ourselves and others) we fast from that which is holding us back, so that we can experience and other's can see God's glory through us!

This week for Sisterhood Cinema, we interviewed V.O actress Amanda Celine Miller - haven't met her in real life but she seems like such a sweetheart - and her interview relates perfectly to what is written above!! This woman is a BTS powerhouse - you can check out her list of credits here! For this Q&A, she spoke about how encouraging words from an industry veteran launched her career, her journey of rising up from depression/suicide and also not putting anyone in the industry on a pedestal! I loved learning more about her and I am excited that you all get to too!

Check out her interview along with some other links below:

1. You have close to one-hundred voice-over credits (wow!). How did you get started in voice-over acting and how have you been able to maintain such a fruitful career?

I was always that nerdy theatre kid playing around and coming up with new characters. I performed as much I could in local high school theatre productions, and I eventually went to University of Maryland to study theatre. While in school, the voice actor/director Tony Oliver came to town to offer one of his Adventures in Voice Acting workshops where I got my first taste of acting for video games and anime dubbing.

At the end of the workshop he pulled me aside and said “You have a future in this business” and I carried that with me all throughout my junior and senior year, read and listened to as many resources on voice acting as I could, and practiced new characters and voice placements every day. I was hungry for it and was constantly looking for ways to improve.

Once I graduated, I packed my car and peaced out to Los Angeles where I reached out to a friend I made at the workshop who now worked at a popular voice over recording studio. He helped me get a part-time internship where I answered phone calls and got clients coffee for several months, but the staff knew I was an actor and eventually would throw me a bone, letting me do background voice work playing random waiter #1 or little boy #3, 6, and 7. Stuff like that.

All that eventually graduated to slightly bigger and bigger bit parts, and they were like “hey she doesn’t suck” so they let me audition for lead roles at that point, and over time I started booking, and one job lead to another.

After 3 years of rejections I finally got signed by a VO agent and started getting access to incredible opportunities, and that’s when my career really started to take off. And I don’t say that to mean like “I got an agent and it’s been a piece of cake since!” An agent can get you access to the jobs, but actually cultivating and maintaining a career is on you. You gotta always be training and staying on top of your skills, and also building relationships within the industry so people will vouch for you with the decision-makers. And you don’t do that by being schmoozy and annoying them if you run into them at a bar. You “network” by building a reputation as being an actor who’s a master of your craft, always honing your skills, someone who’s always professional, and easy to work with. Someone of whom a casting director can say “this person always does solid work, I can rely on them, and they make my job easier and make me look good to the clients”. If that’s how they see you, they’re gonna bring you in and maybe even tell others about you, further expanding your network and therefore your career opportunities.

2. What was the lowest point of your career and how did you bounce back from it? (TRIGGER WARNING: This answer deals with the darkness of mental illness - please read at your own risk.)

In general my mid to late twenties were extremely hard on me mental health-wise. Around 20 I suddenly started developing extreme insomnia that left me raw and extremely irritable and emotionally unstable, which grew into full blown depression with hospitalizations and everything. On top of that I had a bad breakup with my college (and first) boyfriend so it hit me really hard and took me a looong time to bounce back from.

We were supposed to move out to LA together so that heartbreak --compounded by the fact that I now knew no one in LA and it being such hustle-driven industry town and so physically spread out, made my years in LA a very isolating and miserable experience for me.

It also didn’t help that I had been misdiagnosed repeatedly by psychiatrists since college with chronic depression, then bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety, OCD, then back to just depression, and they had put me on all sorts of psychiatric medications that didn’t seem to be helping. Regular talk therapy was also proving fruitless too. I could TALK about all the things that were wrong with me, but it didn’t stop me from constantly crying and feeling like I was in a deep state of fear and grief every second of my life. That kind of intensity day in day out takes a toll on you, and I got to a point where I felt so hopeless and lifeless. Like it was more effort to keep living than it was to just not.

Around 26, I finally had a rather ambivalent suicide attempt. I didn’t want to die necessarily, but I no longer had anything left to give to what felt like the Herculean effort required in just existing under the weight of such extreme emotions. Maybe that sounds overdramatic now, but that’s how I felt.

Luckily the attempt didn’t work, and a couple months later I ended up booking a role as my favorite character from my childhood show (Sailor Jupiter in Sailor Moon) and started realizing all the things life had in store for me that I could’ve never imagined, and it opened me up to the possibility that even if I still felt hopelessly depressed at the time, miracles can and do happen, and maybe one day, just possibly, life wouldn’t hurt so much.

For me that miracle came in the form of finally landing on the right therapist and getting a correct diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. Yes depression and unstable moods and all that are a part of it, so my previous therapists weren’t wrong per se, but their approach was. It’s along the lines of PTSD where it’s more a maladaptive pattern of behaviors and defense mechanisms we adopted while growing up in order to cope with trauma. So we shifted to a new style of therapy (mainly Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and somatic processing) and did the extremely hard work over the course of about 3 years of literally changing who I was. So much of “me” (or what I thought was me) was just these coping mechanisms, and I had been terrified to try new ways of being for fear of losing myself like “who will I be if I don’t feel emotions this deeply?” or “If you take away the anxiety, depression, anxious attachment style, etc. will there be anything left?” When it turns out, the past three years haven’t been sculpting an entirely new me out of nothing or sandblasting who I am down to nothing. It’s been more excavating the real me from all the crap I was buried under and restoring that version of myself to its full glory.

3. Has there ever been a character that you have not been comfortable with as a voice-actor? If yes, how did you handle that?

I’m a mixed-race actress, and Hollywood’s really trying to lean into casting with a lot of ethnic specificity right now, which is great in that it’s opening up opportunities for actors of color who might not have gotten heard before, because casting can sometimes be insular and just keep re-hiring the same actors they already know.

So if casting has to reach outside their comfort zone to find actors of color or actors who fit criteria that aren’t already in their inner circle, it’s a win-win because then casting gets to meet new people to add to their database and more actors get opportunities that wouldn’t have before.

That being said, I’ve been asked to play roles where they wanted me to be “urban” or have more “ethnic sass” because I guess I was there to fill some racial quota (like “hey she’s brown, that’s good enough. Throw her in the booth!”) and those sessions are always uncomfortable because I feel like they’re asking me to put on the accent of a socio-economic class or culture that isn’t mine, and I feel like I have no right to comment on or even attempt to mimic it without it verging on disrespectful.

So usually I’ll try to get by just playing it with my own voice and sometimes they let me, but if they really want to lean into the “urban” thing, I’ll give them what they want (which is usually uncomfortable for everyone in the room since my voice is as urban as a pumpkin spice latte) and let them see for themselves that I’m not the right actor for this role, so if they want authentic, they should probably hire someone who actually is from that background instead of assuming all brown people talk alike.

4. You are also a writer! When writing do you work better individually or with a team?

I’m a pretty independent person so whether it was a school group project or a personal writing project, I don’t really work well as a team because I have a hard time trusting others to lift their weight, but also because I’m kind of a control freak and protective of my characters as if they’re my kids. So I’m like “uh no, you’re not their daddy, you can’t just come in here and parent my kids. They don’t want to go where you trying to take them.”

It’s a little easier if it’s not my idea. I love brainstorming other people’s ideas in a group, but when it’s my creation and it’s close to my heart, I want to carry it to term myself. (What’s with all my motherhood references today? I hear you biological clock, shut up!)

I have a couple TV pilots I’m trying to get off the ground, a horror short I eventually want to develop into a feature, and I want to eventually raise enough money to be able to finish my paranormal mockumentary comedy web series Ghosts ‘n Stuff Inc (check it out @ghostsnstuffinc if you’re interested!)

So I’ve got a lot of cool writing stuff in the works, but I was recently asked by two friends to come on as their writing partner for a female-centric western they’re writing which I’m excited about so who knows? Maybe in a year I’ll have changed my tune and be like “I only write in teams now. Partnered writing is the way to be!”

5. What is the biggest lesson you have learned from your career?

That desperation or putting people on pedestals gets you nowhere, and those who we often see as “above us” are just people too, and that I have something valuable to offer whether they know me or not so I should carry myself confidently.

Part of industry success is talent, but at the start a lot of it is hustling so you can get in front of and impress the “gatekeepers” so they’ll take a chance on you and then those gatekeepers talk to other gatekeepers, and eventually one day you look around and realize these producers and casting directors and industry people aren’t gatekeepers above you.

They’re your peers, your co-workers, and you have a mutual respect (or at least that’s been my experience).

I don’t think you ever have the feeling of “now I’ve made it” per se, because there are people who make more money than me or have booked way higher profile jobs than me, but even they’re still looking to the next thing to be their big break. I think one way of possibly “making it” is when there’s a little more ease to the whole process and you’ve made the sacrifices, invested in yourself and your talent, put in the reps and the 10,000 hours, let relationships grow organically over time, and then one day you arrive to a place where this career is way more fun than it is work and things come to you a lot easier, because you laid that foundation over time so now you get to reap the benefits of those seeds you planted and get to see opportunities blossoming around you.

See??? Didn’t I tell you she is amazing!! And what can we learn from this interview? Stay hungry, Amanda went out of her way to learn as much as she could about VO acting - no one had to force her. No matter how hard it gets, don’t give up on life - Amanda’s breakthrough came at her lowest point - please reach out if you are ever in a dark place, if you have no one you can speak with personally - here is the suicide hotline and an anonymous international prayer line too! Also, the therapist she worked with is Dr. Allyn Rodriguez in LA and Miller also recommends finding a DBT group (dialectical behavioral therapy as a good alternative/supplementation if a specific doctor is not available and it is also affordable. The industry is growing but it still has some work to do - we will just leave it at that. You need to check out Ghosts ‘n Stuff Inc and finally, desperation in the entertainment industry (or any industry) are never needed - you are just as important as the people you look up to! :)))

We also wanted to include this Q&A Panel that she did at 2019 Fan Expo in Toronto a couple months ago - she gives even more great advice here:

Oh and she does more than just V.O’s - here is her Comedy/Commercial reel:

And we wanted to end by reminding you about the WAVE Grant for first-time WOC filmmakers, here is the SC link: https://bit.ly/2BMoxBV

I reached out and they said that animated shorts are accepted - so if you are thinking about producing your own animated short to practice your VO skills, this grant might be helpful for you - just wanted you to know! #SisterhoodCinema

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