Not knowing much about the narrator - who he was, even - Mendez debated how the voice would sound. Then, later that day - before he had to pick his kids up from school - he pulled up the email again, and decided to give the audition a shot. At first glance, Mendez thought it was yet another role poking fun at Latinos.

The role literally said 'Latin Lover Narrator.' And I was like, I don't wanna do this. 'It said telenovela announcer with a Hispanic accent. He records his voice-overs mostly from his home. Mendez reads from a Jane the Virgin script in his bedroom recording studio. 'Grandmother' in standard American English has different syllable emphasis - 'GRAND-mother' - than the word spoken with, say, English with a Dominican accent - 'Grand-MO-ther.' He studied how people's inflections and tongue placements change depending on what accents they're taking on. His L's, N's, M's and R's, he says, are weaker than standard American English. So in his makeshift studio, in the bedroom he shares with his wife, recording out of a small closet that's lined with board games and books to absorb the sound, he created a workout he calls VO 90 X - like boot camp for your voice - with which he spent 30 minutes daily for 90 days, intensely working on sounds.

His goal was to learn to talk without his accent but not lose it entirely. He was sent African-American voice-over roles and Spanish-speaking ones, but rarely received ones meant for the general market. This insistence on labeling him one thing - which he's written about before - was an issue he ran into with talent managers, too. 'You heard everyone in the room talking about, 'What accent is that?' where they had never heard someone in voice-over who had an urban, Latino, New York, New Jersey mixture. They thought he couldn't hear their reaction to his voice-over. During one class, he'd just finished recording a track in the studio and his classmates were on the other side of the glass, observing. He signed up for voice-over classes and learned his Dominican-New York-New Jersey upbringing made things complicated. and that kind of took me back, like, 'Huh, there's something there,' ' Mendez says.

'In high school when I would read in Spanish, especially, some of the girls would ask me to do it again.

People always said there was a Mendez voice - his grandfather, his father, his brothers all had it - that was deep and booming. So he fell back on something he had all along: his voice. Mendez stands in his bedroom recording studio. After that, he tried pursuing a career in producing reggae, struggling so much in the early 2000s he thought he'd be homeless. He studied architecture - the most creative major he thought he could get away with - for a short while at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Mendez's dad, who immigrated to the states from the Dominican Republic, worked in a tombstone factory before opening his own business, and hoped Mendez would take it over with his three other brothers.īut Mendez had other ideas. They fed his imagination and were a break from a more serious, less typical childhood: He sold headstones at the family business - and even designed a six-crypt mausoleum as he got older. Finding His VoiceĪ typical kid, Mendez loved comics. #cleanuptime #underthebedĪ video posted by Anthony Mendez on at 9:06am PDTīut his journey in finding this voice - one that encourages him to play with an accent instead of dampen it - came after years of career change and trying to fit himself to a mold.

Narrator voice