Interview with Mia Barron
Mia Barron is an American actor. She won an Obie for her performance in Hurricane Diane at New York Theatre Workshop. She also won an Obie and a Drama Desk Award for her work in the Off Broadway production of The Wolves. She Co-Created, along with director Lars Jan, a Theatrical adaptation of Joan Didion’s The White Album, which premiered in New York to sold out houses at BAM’s Harvey Theatre as part of the Next Wave Festival. She is known for her extensive New York City theater credits, alongside her television and independent film work, most recently Half Empty Half Full, which received a New York Film Award nomination for Best Ensemble. She is also known as the voice of Molotov Cocktease on the Cartoon Networks’s long-running comic science-fiction series, The Venture Bros.
Mia narrated the Girls with Bright Futures audiobook (Recorded Books). We recently had the chance to speak with Mia about narrating audiobooks and her experience recording Girls with Bright Futures.
KatznDobs: How did you get into audiobook narrating?
Mia Barron: I was primarily a New York-based theater actor. That was my training and I worked on a lot of new plays and with playwrights. I loved bringing a world and a playwright’s voice to life. The audiobook component was a very lucky and beautiful fluke. I was in my early 20s and my voice sounded very young. I was doing a play and the artistic director of the company had gotten a call asking for a very young-sounding actor. She asked if I would be interested in auditioning for an audiobook. I was so nervous. I had no idea what I was doing. After that I got a sprinkling of requests. As I’ve gotten more experienced and learned more about the audio narrating world, I’ve made it a more regular part of my life. I really love doing it.
KatznDobs: Can you describe how you prepare to narrate an audiobook?
Mia Barron: It’s changed over the years. When I was starting out, I would prep so meticulously because I was nervous. I would read the book several times and I would mark every sentence where I was going to breathe and what word I was going to stress. When you do an audiobook, you get paid for the finished hours of recording. If the book is four hours long when people listen to it, you get paid for four hours of work. So if you prep that book for 25 hours, you’re basically doing the narration for free. Over the years, as I’ve gotten more experienced, I’m able to do that kind of work more unconsciously. Now I read the book and the bulk of my prep is identifying the characters, getting a sense of where I’m going to place their voices, and how they’re going to sound.
KatznDobs: The final length of Girls with Bright Futures is 11 hours and 15 minutes. Can you describe the recording process?
Mia Barron: Before the pandemic, I would go into a studio and work with an engineer. We’d record large chunks at a time, often five or six hours a day. You could record the book in about a week. During the pandemic, it usually takes at least double the length of the book to record. I set up a studio at home and my child is home schooling. I’m not linked with anyone else’s schedule, so it becomes a weird, mad frenzy of domestic obligation where I know I have to finish the recording, but I can’t say to my family, “well, I’m at work these hours,” so you wind up doing all sorts of other domestic things and then in the middle of the night, doing three hours of recording. So I’m working in smaller chunks, which in some ways is wonderful because I can dictate my own schedule. But in some ways, I miss the intensity of living with the book in a more sustained way. Narrating is a weirdly very high concentration act in order to be as precise as you need to be to make your thoughts clear, to get the words exactly right, also to be alive within it and make the characters come to life.
KatznDobs: Is it up to you to decide how to bring the characters to life or are you given direction?
Mia Barron: If if you’re working with an engineer on site, they are watching for technical mistakes or word mess ups. Usually you have a lot of freedom. Every once in a while in a recording session, there’s a director or the writer who might have very strong opinions or you’ll get feedback from a few chapters. As an actor, you’re hired because they trust your voice. I go with my instincts on it. It’s the most fun for me to do a book like Girls with Bright Futures where there are really vivid, rich, lusty characters who desperately want things and then you can inhabit them as an actor.
KatznDobs: We recently had to read the first chapter of Girls with Bright Futures out loud for a podcast and it was all we could do to hold it together reading a couple of the phrases. Any funny stories about recording this particular book?
Mia Barron: Certainly when I was prepping the book, I was very attuned to the humor and the extremity of people’s desires and how that leads to not only violence and insanity, but also comedy. Ultimately part of training as an actor is being focused on not judging your character, but being inside the character and imagining what they want and why they’re going after it that way. It’s the same thing with audiobooks. First I went through the initial read of Girls with Bright Futures, which was not out loud, and laughed and enjoyed it the way I would, as if I was a civilian reader. By the time I go to record, it’s my job. I innately gravitate towards the character’s internal desires, which are not funny to them, particularly in this book as they are so desperate for certain outcomes. I felt the more I could attach to that idea, the comedy would come through on its own.