For Mara Wilson, who played the plucky schoolgirl heroine in the 1996 film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “Matilda,” audiobook roles scratch her acting itch while enabling her to qualify for SAG-AFTRA health insurance. “And I don’t have to deal with the nonsense and scrutiny of Hollywood. I feel like they don’t know what to do with someone in their 30s, Jewish and LGBTQ,” says the Los Angeles actor, who has narrated some 60 titles over the last four years and won a 2025 Audie (the Oscars of audiobooks).
“I can play a queer tattooed ex-punk nun,” she says of the roles available, “be a demon, a fairy, an old woman, a little girl, a murderer, a victim or both sides of a love affair.”
Bronson Pinchot — the master of accents known for scene-stealing turns as Serge in the “Beverly Hills Cop” film franchise, Balki in ABC’s “Perfect Strangers” and the chef Didier on Netflix’s “The Residence” — has tackled an even greater variety of roles, having voiced more than 450 audiobooks so far. Recording from his home in Pasadena, he has played men and women of all ages, races, nationalities and abilities, as well as “postapocalyptic people living in trees and empresses of fictitious planets,” he notes.
No matter the book or its characters, Pinchot says, “it’s the one performative art where an actor can focus more on the narrative intention than their own gender and ethnicity.”
The pair are just two of the many actors vying for audiobook roles at a time when the talent pool is expanding and casting is becoming a growing topic of debate. U.S. audiobook sales revenues grew 13% to $2.2 billion in 2024, according to the Audio Publishers Assn., rivaling and in some cases surpassing e-books in popularity.
“Audiobooks are the darlings of publishing,” says Robin Whitten, founder of AudioFile magazine, which reviews narrator performances. “Listeners who find a voice they like will listen to books they hadn’t considered before because they want that narrator to tell them a story.”
But this bounty isn’t shared by all. Performers such as Julia Whelan, a former child actor and author of “My Oxford Year,” and Edoardo Ballerini, who played Corky Caporale on “The Sopranos,” have developed robust audiobook careers and entrepreneurial offshoots — in 2024, Whelan founded Audiobrary, a publishing company that pays royalties to narrators and distributes titles including Ballerini’s own productions of public domain classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Most audiobook actors, however, face a multitude of challenges: The wages are lower than other voice gigs; they may be paid, for instance, between $2,000 and $6,000 for a book with a 10-hour listening time, no matter how many hours it takes to record. They face increased competition from SAG-AFTRA members, non-union and even amateur performers who may check desired demographic boxes. And household-name-famous actors are also entering the industry in multi-cast productions such as Audible’s upcoming Harry Potter series with Hugh Laurie, Matthew Macfadyen and Riz Ahmed, due in November.
Worst by far, for the journeyman performer, is the looming specter of AI-generated narration.
“Right now AI sounds artificial,” says David Aaron Baker, who has narrated works by sci-fi masters Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. “You can tell it’s a robot.”
Advances in home recording technology along with COVID-19 shutdowns and the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike (from which audiobook work was exempt) spurred narrators and wannabes to set up home studios. This reduced costs for production companies while saddling actors with overhead and the need to engineer and direct their own recordings. (The learning curve, says actor Bahni Turpin, “gave me so many headaches and meltdowns.”) Despite this, the number of performers has grown exponentially larger, more geographically dispersed and more diverse. As a result, publishers and authors now have a greater ability to cast authentic voices, creating both opportunities and limitations for narrators.
“We always strive to cast voices that reflect the ethnicity, race and sexuality of the main character or the author,” says Jeff Tabnick, head casting director at Recorded Books, which produces 1,200 titles each year and is the only major production company that offers residuals to audiobook narrators. “And if the text doesn’t seem to need a specific race or ethnicity, we consider people from all races and ethnicities.”
Turpin, a Black actor who narrated “The Help” and “The Hate U Give,” has worked almost exclusively on projects with Black authors and protagonists in her 20-year audiobook career in addition to acting with the Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles and appearing on “NCIS.” “I have done a series of books by Stacia Kane,” she recalls as an exception, “where the lead character was a white witch.”
Black actor Dominic Hoffman, meanwhile, voiced the white character of Huckleberry Finn and Jim, the protagonist, for Percival Everett’s “James,” winning an Audie and an L.A. Times Festival of Books prize for his narration, and previously portrayed Eastern European Jewish, Italian and Black characters for the audiobook recording of James McBride’s “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store,” a period novel. “Black people are more skilled at crossing that divide simply because we live and wholly function in a white world,” contends Hoffman, the author of “Late Rehearsals,” a story collection out this fall. “We are adept at speaking like them and navigating their culture.”
Born in West Virginia to Indonesian and Chinese immigrant parents, actor Nancy Wu, who is known for narrating the “X-Men: Mutant Empire” and the “Avatar: The Last Airbender” series, began working as a narrator during an era when, she says, “I could voice all kinds of characters I’d never be able to play visually: the leading lady, the evil spirit king, a 6-foot-tall, blue-eyed, blonde vampire queen. It was very freeing.”
In recent years, however, she has observed that casting has become more complex and specific. “The industry worried about getting ethnicity ‘wrong’ and began to get extremely specific with identity casting,” Wu explains. “But the danger is that when casting becomes too granular, actors risk getting increasingly pigeonholed.”
Deepti Gupta, a 2022 Audie best female narrator winner for “The Parted Earth” by Anjali Enjeti and a recurring actor on the medical drama “The Pitt,” says casting can be a “weird Catch-22. On one hand we want specificity, but that can make actors feel stereotyped.” The Delhi-born, L.A.-based actor adds that she knows narrators “who don’t put their photos online on purpose or use a name without ethnicity to be able to do more than what the industry thinks they can.”
“Ninety percent of my audiobook work is based on my last name,” observes Thom Rivera, who has narrated works by Gabriel García Márquez, Guillermo del Toro and Michael Nava. “There’s an assumption that with a Latino name, I speak Spanish fluently, but I am not a native speaker,” says the actor, who trained in Shakespeare and the classics at Cal State Northridge and UC Irvine. “If a book is culturally specific, it’s important that there is bone-deep experience. If I’m not right culturally, it should go to someone else. If it’s a book about an American, I’m an American, and I don’t think that should matter that I am Chicano. But sometimes it does.”
Consumers and online reviews also play a role in casting. “In the beginning, audiobooks were mostly recorded by about 100 to 200 Caucasian stage actors who voiced all the books, all the ethnicities and accents. And most were men,” says Debra Deyan, founder of the Deyan Institute in Northridge, which offers courses on audiobook narration. “Now, with more than 10,000 regularly working narrators, audiobooks are at the height of diversity casting, but the product can no longer be for the ear and the imagination alone. The actor’s appearance, personal information, social media and politics are also in play.”
Age can often play a decisive role. “The industry is always looking for young, new talent,” says Eliza Foss, a New York-based actor and director who also teaches audiobook narration at universities. “I am up against two things now — AI and ageism. Being typecast is an industrywide issue, but I did hope that wouldn’t be the case with audiobook narration since the voice is so flexible.”
Emily Lawrence, a career narrator of more than 600 books since 2012 and co-founder of the Professional Audiobook Narrators Assn., notes that “you can absolutely hear age. Age and gender presentation are probably the factors all narrators are limited by in some way.”
Actor-writer-producer Shaan Dasani, an Indian American transgender man who has appeared in “Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders,” began narrating audiobooks in 2021 and notes a key distinction between voice work and onscreen roles. “Narrating audiobooks, I have been able to play a variety of age ranges, genders, sizes and abilities,” he says. “My voice lends itself to younger protagonists, so in that way there is typecasting. But less than half of the titles I’ve narrated have protagonists that are trans, and only three have characters who are South Asian.
“There’s more of an open mind when it comes to casting in the audiobook world,” he concludes. “Audiences are much more savvy today, so we can’t keep telling stories in the same way. And we also can’t be afraid to stumble.”
Reflecting on the long hours he spends alone in the recording booth, Pinchot, the Pasadena voice actor, describes the responsibility he feels to get it right for both authors and listeners in suitably literary terms. “As narrator and all the characters, one is holding the entire fictive universe like Atlas,” he says. “It’s the most difficult job in all of show business.”