It’s no exaggeration that husband and wife team Yuri Lowenthal and Tara Platt aren’t two of the most prolific voice actors in the business. After nearly 25 years in the industry and over 1,200 combined credits, they are officially launching their first-ever online voice acting course, Voice-Over Voice Actor : The Course, available November 11, 2025, on Kajabi. Based on their acclaimed books Voice-Over Voice Actor : What It’s Like Behind the Mic and The Extended Edition, this self-paced program offers 17 in-depth modules, 9+ hours of video instruction, guided exercises, and exclusive resources designed for aspiring voice actors at every level. Moreover, this marks the first time the veteran voice actors have translated their decades of behind-the-mic experience into a structured, accessible course that students can take from anywhere, at their own pace.
The Beat had the pleasure of chatting with Lowenthal and Platt about their latest education endeavor with this online course and why anyone looking to start their VO career don’t want to miss out on this rare opportunity!
Taimur Dar: The obvious first question is to ask what inspired you to create this voiceover course after so long?
Tara Platt: As you probably know, we have our book, Voice-Over Voice Actor: What It’s Like Behind the Mic. And then we did the 10th anniversary updated extended edition. And throughout this whole time, probably the last 15 years or so, people have been asking us, “Will you teach a class? Can you teach a class? We want you to teach a class.” We just never could figure out how to make it work because our lives are so erratic. And, of course, we didn’t want to be rescheduling on people. It just seemed a little overwhelming. And then at some point in the last year and a half or so, you were watching a masterclass.
Yuri Lowenthal: Yeah, I was watching a masterclass, and you can make classes that people can take on their own schedule. Whenever they want to do it, they can just hop on and do the learning. I thought that type of format would be a way that we could put a class together where the curriculum is based on the things we teach in our book. We wanted to have more of a classroom setting. And so we found a platform, Kajabi that lent itself to that type of learning. We shot a whole bunch of classroom videos. There’s some audio homework, a workbook, and audition log. And if you hadn’t read the book, or you wanted a refresher the audio book is also included. The biggest mistake was we thought this will be easy and this won’t take that long. It ended up taking us about a year to put it all together.
Tara Platt: And we had testers. We had people come in from various phases. Some people knew nothing about voiceover. Some people were interested and curious. Some people worked very regularly. We had a gamut of people testing it because we wanted to know, how does this resonate? Is this enough information? Is it not enough information? Because in our minds, we want this to be like a college level 101 class. A very great basic primer to set a good foundation giving you tools across the whole spectrum of what you would need to know to start a career. Having the testers helped us sort of like tune in and change some stuff and modify and adjust.
Yuri Lowenthal: Most of the people who are coming up to us asking about classes were people who were interested, but really didn’t know where to get started. And so, this class is really geared towards people wrapping their heads around getting their careers started and building the skills and tools they would need to do that.
Taimur Dar: In pretty much any career, your education never ends. For you, what makes a good teacher or coach?
Tara Platt: I think a great teacher comes from good information. That teacher is able to translate their experience into discernible data that can be gifted. It’s not just good enough to say, “I know what I’m doing but I don’t know how to tell you to do that.” They need to be able to take experientially the things that they have gleaned from their life’s career, the span of their work, and say, “This is what you need to know. And this is how you can do that. And if you put this tool in your toolbox, it’ll help you at a later point when you don’t know what you’re doing.”
That’s kind of in a way what we did with our books. We tried to say, “What did we not know when we started? Where do we make mistakes? What would have been helpful? What are we now learning and how is the technology changing?” Which why we had to do the extended edition and update it because things change over time and you learn more. And then for the class, we wanted to use the same foundational points that are in the books and be able to chat about what that means and how you go about doing it. So we’re breaking apart the ideas that are in the book in a more classroom teaching experience. So we’re talking through what we’ve learned and how it works. So many of the jobs that we learned on and that we worked on are starting to disappear, especially with AI technology. Those are going away.
Yuri Lowenthal: At least temporarily, with them trying to replace background characters and NPCs with AI where we learned those lessons. That’s where we learned those lessons. But I’m glad you asked the question the way you did, because it forced me to think about what makes for me good learning. It’s all about the distillation of the information. I think learning is different than giving somebody advice. I don’t believe in advice because advice implies that, “Well, this is how it worked for me. And if I tell you how I did it, it’ll work the same for you.” Everybody has a slightly different path. If you can distill down the information in a way that people can take that and make that their own, they can challenge you to not just take the information and try to replicate it.
Tara Platt: We have a nine-year-old and when you show trust and belief in a child, they have the opportunity to blossom and grow. This is a self-led class, so you get out of it, what you put into it. We’re trusting that we’re giving information and that you can take that information and actually start to make it work for yourself and use it and implement it. If you’re teaching for answers, that’s different than teaching for understanding and teaching for choice. We want to explain things in a way where you ask questions and start making your brain figure out how you do it for you. We are not you and you are not us. We want to empower students taking the class to go beyond us. Take the information we’ve given as a foundation because that’s what we’ve had to do. Also we all learn differently and learn from each other. It’s about trusting the students and trusting the exchange of knowledge.
Taimur Dar: In recent years, I’ve been hosting panels showcasing voice directors most recently Sirena Irwin and Collette Sunderman, two of the best in the business. Some know Sirena was mentored by the legendary Andrea Romano. During the panel, Collette wondered about their potential overlapping directing styles since both she and Romano started at Hanna-Barbera. I’m curious with voice directing and voice acting, is there a lineage or legacy of teaching and education?
Yuri Lowenthal: Definitely. And I think it goes back to trust. For us, the directors we love working with the most, we feel that they trust us. We’ve worked with directors that feel like they just need to tell us what to do to make sure that they get the thing that they need. And when it becomes a dialogue between the actor and the director, you feel like the director trusts you to bring something to it, besides what they’re just trying to get out of you. And to give you an opportunity to bring that to your performance and bring that to the project is when I really connect with the director. And the directors that you’ve talked about are those kinds of directors. That’s why they’re icons.
Tara Platt: There is so much that is derivative, right? All of us have heard the work of Mel Blanc. So then it creeps into every choice and decision. I’m not comparing us to Mel Blanc, because we’re not Mel Blanc.
Yuri Lowenthal: We’re not even Eric Bauza!
Tara Platt: But you have a foundation of really good, informative bricks to build upon. But we have all the same bricks we understand. So that when somebody makes a choice and they reference something that was very Bugs Bunny, even if they’re not doing it as Bug Bunny in the character, there’s just sort of this zeitgeist understanding and collective unconscious acceptance of that. You build on the things that were before to hopefully build something better and stronger. Architecturally, you first start with very simple structures, and they get more expansive and more interesting. And that’s true of all art. There is a derivative quality. Even acting, say the great Hamlet speech, there is something about everyone who’s ever done it before. There’s a derivative quality to it.
Yuri Lowenthal: Building on the greats who came before.
Taimur Dar: I was listening to a podcast where voice actor and director Sam Riegel was discussing how Sue Blu taught him how to find the “turns” in lines meaning that no character in animation begins a line in one position and ends it in another. I’m quite curious if that’s a real thing or something you’ve been taught?
Yuri Lowenthal: It’s definitely a thing. I love that you brought it up, because it’s a note that I get sometimes. And every time I get it, I’m like, “Of course. You want to find that turn.“ A character that ends in the same place that they started is not interesting to watch. So why not apply that to the lines as well? I wouldn’t obsess over every line. That can slow you down. Especially in animation where you have less dialogue and fewer lines, on a show like Samurai Jack maybe two lines, to establish the story and the character through the dialogue, you want to maximize that.
Tara Platt: Especially because you’re using your voice to express that. You don’t get all of the physical gestures. Obviously, animation should help with that. But that’s somebody else’s job. That’s not your job, so you need the turns.
But I do think that that goes back to acting 101 in a way. You need to know what’s going on so you can figure out how you’re getting what you want ultimately in the scene. And that’s where turns happen. That’s where shifts and switches [happen]. And you’re just constantly trying new things to access what you’re trying to do in that moment. Because the first thing doesn’t necessarily work. You have to try something different and that’s where you’re getting the turns and interesting choices. People always talk about interesting choices. It’s not just that you go around doing interesting choices. You have something that you’re doing. And then you switch it. And that becomes an interesting choice.
Yuri Lowenthal: We talk about imagination a lot as a tool in acting. That seems like a given. But with the rise of method acting, I think imagination has been kind of left in the dust as to how powerful it is. That’s something we have as kids that we get beaten out of us as we get older. The more we can hold on to that, the more it becomes valuable.
Tara Platt: I want a t-shirt that says, “This is fueled by the power of imagination.”
Yuri Lowenthal: I would buy that shirt.
Taimur Dar: It’s funny you talk about interesting choices. I was listening to a podcast of a filmmaker talking about casting a small bit part where a character gets cut in line and says, “Can you believe this guy?” But on the day of shooting the scene, the actor kept giving the most over-the-top delivery instead of something natural like the director wanted. Does your course discusses handling these types of incidental or minor roles?
Yuri Lowenthal: We do talk about how you can’t always be the lead in a show. It’s filled out with interesting characters that makes the world interesting. For me, when I get called in to do smaller bit parts or bit parts in addition to a larger part, it’s always super exciting because there’s always a little more leeway for you to take chances with the smaller characters and to showcase something that people don’t necessarily know you for. I might try out this accent that nobody’s asked me to do before and see how that goes.
I made a name for myself over at Blizzard with a director specifically from my side characters on Diablo. We had so much fun with the side characters that now in fact she’s directing me on a Blizzard thing and I’m a much larger role. But our relationship started there because I think you can play so much with the side characters. You can have so much fun.
Tara Platt: Your story about the guy, you don’t always want it to be so crazy and over-the-top that it so stands out. But there’s a time and a place for that. You need to be able to fit into the world. And if they need a character to just say, “Can you believe that guy?” That’s what’s needed in that moment.
But if they don’t know what they need or they’re like, “Hey whatever you want to try here,” that’s a chance. And also if it’s a voice, that’s not as easy to do, you don’t have to sustain that for four hours. It’s okay if you’re doing something not as sustainable. That’s kind of like Easter eggs for the audience. These interesting characters that flesh out the world of the video games or animated series. I think there’s no greater compliment than when an audience starts to fall in love with one of those extraneous characters and wants to know the story. Sometimes there literally are offshoots of shows because of a character that shouldn’t have been an important character. But they were so interesting and there was something that captivated and captured our attention that we want more.
And that’s really fun. It goes back to that old adage, “There’s no small parts, only small actors.” That’s a place to play and have fun. You don’t have to just phone it in. It’s not even phoning it when you’re like, “Can you believe this guy?”You don’t necessarily have to be largely animated to not phone it in. To not phone it in just means to have it grounded and the touchstone of the reality of the moment for that character in that experience. It’s an exciting and interesting to see the humanity of that character come to life.
Yuri Lowenthal: Especially with games that have these huge worldswith so man characters. The characters create the worlds. So many games these days, you go play them because want to live in that world. Sometimes that world is fleshed out, created, and sometimes dictated by the multitude of smaller characters.
Taimur Dar: There’s a misconception that to be great in voiceover you need to have an immense repertoire different voices. Though it certainly helps, do you emphasize performance over attempting different voices?
Tara Platt: That’s our angle. People may think you have an interesting voice, but performance is what’s going to carry you. And performance educates choices for the voice. So even if you’re doing a similar vocal pattern [in terms of] resonance and pitch and volume, the point of view and perspective of the character is going to tell you everything about what’s going on. Performance is carving out what you are doing.
Yuri Lowenthal: Having a lot of different voices you can do is not valueless. That is a great skill to have. But you don’t need to be able to do that to be successful and play a lot of different characters. My voice doesn’t change a lot. But the circumstances are different. I lean on the writing a lot. And the production each time is different telling a different story. I don’t feel pressured that it needs to sound different form the last character I played. We try to remove some of the pressure that I think people feel going in.
Taimur Dar: Any final words you want our readers to know?
Tara Platt: We’re thrilled about the class. It launches on November 11th. We’re going to do a live Q&A on Yuri’s Instagram at 11 PST. 11/11 at 11. Easy to remember If you join live, we are going to be announcing a special discount code that saves you a lot of money on class. Though if you sign up for the course newsletter, if you can’t make the live Q&A, you still get it emailed to you so you don’t have to miss out on anything.
