If you've watched any animated series from the mid-1980s to the past couple of years, you've enjoyed the work of legendary casting and voice director Andrea Romano. While she's helmed beloved animated classics like DuckTales and The Legend of Korra, Romano's most celebrated projects are casting and voice directing animated series and films for the DC Animated Universe. Her acclaimed DCAU work, of course, includes Superman: The Animated Series, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this year with a remastered home video release.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, Romano reflected on her work on Superman: The Animated Series and shared some of her favorite casting stories from the hit animated series.
With Superman: The Animated Series, you were still working with Bruce Timm and the crew at Warner Bros. Animation on projects like Freakazoid! while coming off the success of Batman: The Animated Series. What were you looking for as you were assembling the cast for Superman?
Andrea Romano: With Superman, we knew we wanted a different vocal quality than we had in Batman. We didn't want the two series to be the same style. We definitely did not want to repeat ourselves. While I hoped to bring in actors that I worked with before, we needed to create a style that was very realistic in the vocal performances so that it wasn't too broad or cartoony, if you will. By this point in my personal career, I had begun to gain a reputation for ensemble records, which meant the actors were all in the same room at the same time, which actors and I really like.
There had been a snobbery about doing voiceover in the late '80s so everybody didn't do them. The only [famous] ones from my youth that I was aware of were Tony Curtis as Stony Curtis on The Flintstones, and Ann-Margaret, as Ann-Margrock on The Flintstones -- very few celebrities did voiceover. After the success of Batman, Freakazoid! and a couple other series, I think celebrities got hip to the fact that animation was being produced with real quality -- not that it wasn't before but this was absolute quality with the DC Universe. It was real acting and it was fun because I created fun sessions. People were talking to their friends if they had done a session with [us] yet, not to talk me up but we all had fun making these series.
My job was creating an environment that felt like the actors could explore, play, be safe, and do something broad if they wanted. Or they could pull back and make it much more realistic. I would get calls from agents representing celebrities that specifically wanted to do voiceover in animation and specifically the DC-type stuff. I would keep a list of actors and, when a new character would pop up that needed to be cast, I would look at that list. Suddenly we had many more people and the bonus to that is, when you know an actor's on-camera work, you know whether they're good actors or not. That was always my number one requirement: they had to be good actors.
I can teach voiceover -- as far as how not to pop on microphone, not to breathe deeply into the microphone, not to take an audible breath before you speak. Those are the kind of things I can teach in a four-hour session. I cannot teach acting in a four-hour session. I would bring in an on-camera actor who I knew could act and pair them with other people and always try to surround them with experienced voiceover actors so they could learn. A lot of people learn how to do this on the job and we had fun. It was a very fun series to make.
As a kid, I never knew Dana Delany voiced both Lois Lane and Andrea Beaumont in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, she differentiated her performances so well. What was the idea behind bringing Dana back as a series regular for Superman?
Because she was so darn good! [laughs]
She was just so good in Mask of the Phantasm, which is one of my favorite films that we ever made way back when. She's not only a good actress and understood what she had to do but she had fun. I always like to think of casting a project as casting a party, "Who do I want to be together at this party? Who's going to have fun and who's going to bring something to the party?" She absolutely fit all those categories, so why not give her a chance? The question is, when you get to a project that's probably going to be recording once a week for at least a year, with ADR for another year after that, some actors who are film actors can't commit to that kind of time.
[Dana] could easily do Mask of the Phantasm, as far as time was concerned, but we had to talk to her to see if she was willing to make herself available for what we would need for production. Everybody that auditioned, we asked if they were willing to make themselves available and, if they couldn't, we couldn't consider them for a regular role. We could give them a guest role or whatever. Dana was absolutely willing and always did make herself available in our production and she's just so darn good.
I remember when she auditioned, I always walk actors up to the microphone and chat them up to make them feel comfortable in the room because an audition is a bit of trial. You're being judged and you can get a bit intimidated. Really good actors can get intimidated by the audition process so I try to make them feel really comfortable. I walked [Dana] up to the microphone, chatted her up and went back to the booth, asked if she was ready, and said, "Okay, this is Dana Delany as Lois Lane." There was dead silence. She doesn't speak and I ask if she was okay and she says, "I'm just letting those words wash over me. I've waited so long to hear somebody say I could be Lois Lane." [laughs] It was so charming that this established actress had such a desire to play this character and put all that together and you get a brilliant Lois Lane.
The other big returner you've got is the late, great Ed Asner as Granny Goodness after he was previously Roland Daggett on Batman and Cosgrove on Freakazoid!.
Oh yes, let us not forget his Freakazoid! contribution. That was a fantastic character and he would always say such ridiculous things. That's how I really knew that this stunning and crazy good actor had a really good sense of humor. It was Bruce Timm's idea, I believe, it was Bruce who brought it to me. I didn't come up with the idea for Ed Asner. Bruce asked me if I thought Ed Asner would play a female character and I said, "What's the worst that could happen? He says, 'No'? Let's offer it to him!"
And Ed is still, in my mind, such a wonderful actor and such a great person. I remember his work on Rich Man, Poor Man was stunning and his power was almost scary because, even if you know your stuff as a director, he challenged you and would put you on the spot. I always knew my work anyway and that I was fully ready to go before guys were recording so I reached out to him and said, "Here are the character designs and what the character is. Would you be interested in playing her?" There wasn't even a second of hesitation. He just said, "Absolutely! When do you need me?" He played the role for many different projects and was just crazy good! I do love those silly casting things.
In addition to Ed, you had all these great guest stars, like Malcolm McDowell, Brad Garrett, and Roddy McDowell.
I was always so grateful when they said yes. Malcolm McDowell wanted to play with us and he was so marvelous, so wonderful as Metallo. The temptation with that kind of character is to make the voice robotic and that's the easy way out and he didn't choose to do that. It was such a beautiful performance for that character. Roddy McDowell, my god he was stunning and just a ridiculously good actor.
Brad Garrett, I've known for a million years and this was way before Everybody Loves Raymond and he was a voiceover actor. He had experience doing that and knew what to do. He got to be Bibbo the dockworker and he was Lobo and was another guy who just had a great time. He really liked doing it. As he started to get his success, we were all so happy for him and, as he should have, he became someone who could command a lot more money and it was often our directive at Warner Bros. that everyone got paid the same amount and it was scale. I would occasionally reach out to him and say, "I know you're getting more money sometimes but do you want to come back?" And he would say yes because we grew up in animation together... What a lovely man. I'm so happy about all of his success.
Superman: The Animated Series is available now on Blu-ray and Digital HD.