Villians, evil, baddies… they fun voices to play! But an also be a bit over-the-top and melodramatic.
How can you create the voice for an antagonist character that feels realistic, grounded, and believable… but is still fun to play with?
In this scrappy video, I work through my process for building an antagonist voice for a romantic film.
I use a few of my favourite techniques — things like animal work, accent-inspired sound, and physical choices — to explore how antagonist voices can be shaped without defaulting to cliché “evil” sounds.
This is part of a series of videos on character voices for acting, games, and performance.
I’m also doing this alongside the Archetypes Self Tape Challenge by Manuel Puro, which I genuinely recommend if you’re an actor:
https://www.purocasting.com/the-acting-habit/the-21-day-self-tape-challenge
If you’re interested in developing character voices — or understanding your own voice more deeply — you can add yourself to the Voice Lab Online waitlist here:
https://sendfox.com/alexowenhill
Chapters
00:00 Setting up the antagonist voice challenge
01:20 Why antagonist voices go cartoonish
02:35 Pushing extremes to find realism
03:20 Romantic antagonist text explorations
04:05 Animal work & physical intensity
05:05 Emotion, restraint, and control
06:10 Accent-inspired sound (without doing accents)
07:45 Refining into something playable
09:25 Final takes
10:10 What carried through from the process
#voiceacting #charactervoice #antagonist #voicecoach #actingprocess #voicework #gamevoice #performancetraining
