What Voice Actors Actually Need to Know About Audio Description: A Conversation with Eric Wickstrom
Audio description is one of those genres of voice over that people don't think about until they need it, or until they realize how much craft is actually behind it. It was built for the blind and low vision community, and it has grown into a category that touches almost every major streamer now.
I brought Eric Wickstrom into a recent workshop with my voice over students. Eric heads up East Coast Operations at Descriptive Video Works, and he was the casting and directing producer for the audio description on Netflix's Wednesday, with credits that also include Bridgerton, Squid Game, and Game of Thrones. Fourteen years in, this is still his first love in the industry.
Here is what came out of that conversation.
What Audio Description Actually Is
Eric explained it in the simplest terms I have heard. Imagine watching your favorite show with your eyes closed. There are long stretches where nobody is talking and something important is happening on screen. Audio description is the narration track that fills those gaps so nobody misses it.
He traced its growth back to when Netflix got serious about it, which pulled HBO, Paramount, and eventually every major streamer along. What used to be a handful of network shows airing in prime time is now available on almost all original content produced anywhere in the world, in dozens of languages.
"It's Not a Performance." But It Is Not Flat Either.
This is the piece that landed hardest with my students, because it runs against a lot of what we teach in commercial and character work.
Audio description used to be read completely flat, with no emotion, on purpose. Eric told us older tracks sound almost synthetic now, ironically more robotic than the AI voices trying to replace them. Wednesday changed that. His team brought real feeling back into the read, but the goal was never to perform the material. As he put it, if a listener starts paying attention to the narrator instead of the show, something has gone wrong.
The way he described the right approach is one I have already started using in class. Think of reading a bedtime story to a child. You want them engaged in what happens next. You do not want them so riled up they cannot fall asleep, and you do not want them bored either. You are there to serve the story, not to be the story.
He also compared it to riding the faders on a soundboard. When the music swells, you lean in. When it goes quiet, you pull back. You stay responsive to what is happening in the scene, and you get out of the way of the sound effects and score doing their job.
The Mistakes He Sees Most
When one of my students asked what goes wrong most often in the booth, he did not hesitate. Narrators either overact the read, or they get locked into the old flat style and cannot let any life into it at all. The other trap is technical rather than emotional. Narrators who try to watch the screen and read at the same time lose their place. His advice was to trust your ears. You are listening for the gaps in the dialogue, not tracking the picture. That is what the engineer is there for.
He also flagged punctuation as something actors blow past constantly. A period is a full stop. A comma is a real pause. Those marks are in the script for a reason, and skipping over them changes how clearly the description lands.
On Trusting Your Real Voice
The story he told that stayed with me the most was about a narrator named Sri Gordon, an Asian Black woman from Harlem with an enormous amount of natural warmth and flavor in her speaking voice. For years she had been coached toward a more neutral, polished read, and that was the voice she brought into every booth. On a project that needed something more authentic, Eric asked her to just be herself. She was hesitant. She told him agents and casting rooms had spent years telling her that her real voice was not what people wanted.
She went in and narrated a Dave Chappelle special using her actual voice. It premiered, and Questlove tweeted that whoever had narrated the audio description should be the gold standard going forward. Eric said Sri cried when she heard about it, because it was the first time her natural voice had been the thing that got her the win, instead of something she had to talk herself out of.
Eric's takeaway, and one I now repeat to my own students constantly: if ten people tell you your real voice is not what they are looking for, the eleventh will be the one who wants it.
His Advice for Actors Who Want In
When I asked what he looks for when he is scouting new narrators, he said audio description rewards the same instincts that make you good at audiobooks and e-learning work, so if that is a genre you already enjoy, this is a natural next step.
He is also direct about what he checks first. When he lands on an actor's website, he looks for an audio description sample specifically, and its absence stands out to him. Clean, natural speaking voices are consistently in demand, especially from men, since the field currently skews female.
And representation matters to him in a very real way. He wants narrators whose backgrounds match the material they are voicing, and he has had to actively track down narrators of color whose websites downplayed their own identity in an attempt to be neutrally cast. His advice was blunt: let your background show. It is not a liability. It is exactly what casting is looking for.
I left that workshop more convinced than ever that audio description deserves real space in how we train. It asks an actor to be present, disciplined, and completely themselves, all at once. That is a tall order. It is also exactly what I hope every one of my students walks away able to do.
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