I found Hollis after hearing the audiobook of Anthea Lawson’s Sonata for a Scoundrel. I was amazed by the way Hollis brought the characters
to life. Because I know you’ll love her work on Scandal With a Prince as much
as I do and will want to know more about her, I asked Hollis if she’d agree to
be interviewed.
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| Hollis McCarthy, photo by Yvonne Marchese |
Q: Hi Hollis! I’m
thrilled to have you here. What can you tell my readers about your background?
I grew up in rural Northwest Ohio, and literally went to
school surrounded by cornfields. I got
my BFA and MFA degrees in acting and have been acting professionally around the
country in stage, film, tv and voice-over for twenty some years. I specialize in plays of complex language –
Shakespeare, Pinter, Friel, and so on – and have worked off-Broadway and in
regional theatres like The Old Globe, Alabama Shakespeare, Chicago Shakespeare,
Portland CenterStage, and so on.
Q: When you aren’t in
the studio recording audiobooks, what do you do?
I live in NJ, just across the river from NYC now, so I spend
a lot of time auditioning for plays, TV shows, commercials and so on. I did an episode of The Good Wife, and one of
House of Cards recently. I love to ride
my bike and run with my husband, Mark, an actor/playwright, along the Hudson
River with a view of the city. We also
do stage combat, so we get our swords out in the park sometimes and practice
our broadsword and rapier/dagger fights.
We’re about to be in a play together, playing husband and wife, at a
small local professional theatre right in our neighborhood.
Q: How did you get
started as an audiobook narrator? What is it about audiobooks that you find
appealing?
My husband, Mark McCarthy, who is a terrific narrator, took
an audiobook workshop a few years ago from Paul Ruben, a wonderful producer and
coach, and shared all the great stuff he learned from Paul with me. So we cut our first audiobook demos and
started sending links to producers, I did some books for Audible, hooked up
with an engineer friend who has a studio near me, and it built slowly from
there.
Mom taught us all to read before we started school, and used to read Tolkien aloud to us when we were cleaning up from dinner, to keep the five of us kids from arguing. I’m a voracious reader, and have loved reading out loud since I would read to my little brother, and do the voices of the Sesame Street characters for him. I do a killer Grover. Getting to play ALL the characters in books is great fun. I’ve played a lot of ingenues and leading ladies, and it’s so fun not to be constricted by physical type in audiobook work – to play old, young, English, Egyptian, and everything in between! Telling stories is a wonderful way to make a living, and I feel lucky every time I go into the recording booth to bring an author’s words to audio life.
Q: What kind of
preparation do you do? What challenges have you faced narrating the Royal
Scandals series?
I spend a lot of time on prep. I always start reading the book through just
for fun, like a regular reader, because you get a real feel for the book that
way. Then I go back and work through
slowly, using my IAnnotate app on my tablet, assigning different vocal
qualities to each character, marking “beats” into the text, looking up
words/names that I don’t know how to pronounce, and so on. I also sketch in a few acting cues for
myself, here and there.
One of the big challenges of the RS series is the
dialects! I’m very
English/Scottish/Irish looking, and am great with all those dialects and pretty
much any American dialects you can imagine, because I’ve played them on stage. But I’ve never played Italian or Spanish, for
obvious reasons, so I had to learn those.
I use my husband, who is a great dialect coach, a lot, and also listen
to online coaching and the cds of David Allan Stern. Of course, once you learn the dialect, you
have to reduce how much of it you use, because less is truly more with dialects
in this genre.
Q: Which Royal
Scandals character has been the most fun to narrate?
I’d pick TWO so far:
Anna, the young daughter in Scandal With a Prince, and Fabrizia, the Queen of
Sarcaccia, who is in both of the books I’ve done so far. I love voicing kids, and Anna was a
treat. Her Majesty is so well written –
a lot of emotional depth hidden beneath her regal, formal exterior.
Q: What are your
current projects?
In addition to the play I start rehearsing with Mark on
Monday at Hudson Theatre Works, I have a bunch of audiobooks done and in
post-production, including your lovely Honeymoon With a Prince, a great
non-fiction book by Lauren Kessler called Raising the Barre, another fun cozy
mystery in the series I’m narrating for Leighann Dobbs, and a psychological
thriller called Lucidity by C.J. Lyons.
I have four more lined up to record between now and year’s end,
including two more Royal Scandals books I can’t wait to read!
Thanks so much for joining me, Hollis! I've posted an audio sample of your work on Scandal With a Prince on my website, and look forward to the release of Honeymoon With a Prince in audio in the coming weeks.
For more about Hollis McCarthy, visit her website at www.mccactors.com. You can also search for Hollis by name on
your favorite audiobook platform to hear her other great performances.
