Voice actor Vic Mignogna was about 15 minutes late to his first question-and-answer session with eager fans Friday afternoon at Sac Anime in Sacramento, California, but he more than made up for his tardiness when he arrived, bursting onto the scene with exuberance that matched the excitement of the enthusiastic audience.
Mignogna’s lengthy resume has made him popular with anime fans. His famous roles include playing Edward Elric in the
Fullmetal Alchemist TV series, Broly in
Dragon Ball Z movies and video games and Ikkaku Madarame in the
Bleach TV series. He acts in the
Star Trek web series’
Star Trek Phase II and
Starship Farragut. He’s also a singer and sells CDs of original music from his website, Vicsworld.net and on iTunes.
It takes a lot of energy for actors to infuse emotion into their roles, but Mignogna didn’t leave all of his in the recording studio — he brought quite a bit of it to the session that day. He spent a lot of time walking in and out of rows with his microphone, talking to fans, hugging them and singing with them as the panel went on. Of course he stayed in one place
sometimes, but Mignogna did his best to make the event an interactive experience.
Fans rewarded him with gifts. One gave him a collage with pictures of characters he’s played, and another gave him a replica of a phaser from
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The gentleman with the phaser also brought a copy of a script from the
Real Fans of Genius web series Mignogna’s done with his fan group the Risembool Rangers.
The ads are spoofs of the
Real Men of Genius Bud Light beer commercials. The Anheuser-Busch ads feature a popular theme song to live-action sequences paying tribute to ordinary men. Parodies by Mignogna and the Risembool Rangers have sequences about anime fans instead. At the Friday panel, Mignogna stood still, for a few moments anyway, to sing the song from one of his spoof skits with his fan.
The audience give-and-take didn’t end there. Mignogna led everyone in singing happy birthday to a fan who’d turned 21, and when one girl asked him to give her a hug, he complied.
But Mignogna also got serious when fans asked him about his career in voice acting and how others could break in.
“For those of you interested in voice acting, it has 30 percent to do with your voice and 70 percent to do with acting,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent of the voice actors I know have huge backgrounds in theater.”
His tip? Voice acting hopefuls need to audition for plays at schools, universities, community colleges, churches, and
anywhere they can hone their dramatic skills. But they’ve also got to go to places like Los Angeles, Houston and Dallas where most voice acting work is.
Vancouver’s a good place for it, too, but it’s tough for Americans who want to voice roles in Canada because of the law. “The problem is, you can’t work there if you’re American unless you have some fancy visa. I’ve tried it, believe me,” said Mignogna, who’s American. “I wanted to be in
Death Note so bad, but you will not find an American voice actor in a Canadian show because that’s part of the deal. You have to use their people.”
Mignogna said that’s why he couldn’t play the major villain role in
InuYasha, even though producers offered it to him.
But doing voiceovers is different. Any city with more than 100 people, according to Mignogna, has voiceover work because local businesses want people to voice their commercials. Starting locally with this kind of work could be a great route.
Ironically, though, Mignogna doesn’t like those kinds of jobs himself. That’s one reason why he doesn’t have an agent. Having one might force him to give up his independence and take work he doesn’t enjoy.
“I’ve heard from several actors that if you sign up with an agency, you do what they tell you to do. You audition for what they tell you to audition for because your job is to make money for them, so you can’t be passing on jobs,” he said.
There’s a trade-off, though. Agencies get clients a lot of great gigs, so Mignogna’s sacrificed the opportunity to get some big roles by going solo. He never even knows they exist sometimes because only actors with agents get the inside scoop.
But he doesn’t have regrets about the path he’s chosen. “Yeah, I would love to do bigger things, but it doesn’t drive me. I’m not obsessed with it,” Mignogna said.
Voice acting doesn’t always pay that great, but many people who do it love it, and Mignogna told the audience that making a living doing what you love is worth more than making a lot of it doing what you don’t.
Mignogna fell into voice acting years ago by word-of-mouth. He minored in theater when he was in college, and as he started his live action dramatic career, a friend told him about ADV Films, an anime distributor based in Houston (which is now defunct). Mignogna got a role, and one job led to another before he was on his way to a career in voice work.
Mignogna also spoke of his recent work. He’s played live action roles in the
Fallout: Nuka Break fan film series, and he’s done a commercial for
World of Warcraft by Blizzard Entertainment. The commercial’s less than a minute, but it made a big impression on one convention fan who told Mignogna that she started playing the game because
he was in the commercial.
“Write the Blizzard people and tell them you played just because of me and that they need to put me in their game,” he told the audience.
He’d done dozens of shows over the years before he played Edward in
Fullmetal Alchemist without knowing anything about the show beforehand. He was lucky, too, because Ed’s his favorite character. Ed’s well-written, flawed and tragic, and Mignogna’s been inside his head for years.
“I can’t deny it anymore. I love Edward Elric. Most anime series are around 26 episodes, and if you’re lucky, maybe they’re two seasons, and occasionally, you come across the monster mega series like a
DBZ or a
Pokemon, some of those big ones that just go on forever,” he said. “When you consider that I played Ed [in] the first series and all the video games and the OVAs and then the movie, and then the whole second series and on and on, I’ve played Ed for a long time and I love him.”
Mignogna ended the session to sign autographs. Friday’s event was the first of two he did, with the second one happening on Saturday. Fans in Sacramento can catch Mignogna again at a Risembool Rangers dinner Saturday night at 6:30 p.m.