We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Joy a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Joy, appreciate you joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?
I do wish I’d started looking for Voiceover and Narration work earlier. My first year in college, I had an acting teacher tell me “you really should look into voiceover” and at the time, I felt she was telling me that she could see that I was talented, but she didn’t think I would work much, considering my “look”. A “you’ve got a face (or figure) for radio” type of comment.
I thought, “you don’t like looking at me? Well, there’s nothing wrong with it and I’m gonna MAKE you look at me!” and doubled down on exclusively pursuing on-camera work.
Eventually, after about 15 years, I have achieved a good amount of success on-camera, and along the way, I fell into audiobook narration which is what really changed my life.
Audiobooks and voiceover allowed me to make real money from my craft. It allowed me to make a living wage and make enough residual income in royalties until I was able to quit all my other survival jobs. Taking away that financial desperation, finally let me audition without desperation for on-camera work which, I believe, eventually led to landing my own show on AMC.
In retrospect, I don’t think my professor was commenting on my appearance at all. She was telling me I had unique talent in this specific arena but I couldn’t hear it. I had a big chip on my shoulder regarding my appearance and a very determined rebellious streak and instead of taking her advice I actively avoided that type of work.
I find myself thinking now that all this time, I could have been doing BOTH types of work and probably would have reached my on-camera goals even faster.
Joy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m an actor and audiobook narrator- possibly best known for starring in AMC/Hulu’s critically acclaimed feminist revenge fantasy DIETLAND, or in Twin Peaks: The Return as Senorita Dido. I’ve also made the rounds with guest starring roles on most of the medical shows: Grey’s Anatomy, Chicago Med, The Resident, and The Mindy Project.
I wrote and starred in my own solo show, MY MOBSTER that toured Fringe festivals in the 2010s and was a Webby Award Honoree for creating A FAT RANT: one of YouTube’s first viral videos in 2007.
I’ve also narrated over 250 audiobooks for indie and traditional publishers like Hachette, HarperCollins, and Penguin Random House and even won a couple Audiofile Earphones Awards.
I love playing roles that upend expectations and characters that refuse to be ignored. It really gets me going to play people who can’t fit neatly into any boxes.
Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?
The SAG Foundation and The Actor’s Fund were hugely influential and I wish I’d known about them sooner. There are so many resources available – from the accountability and mastermind groups, the free casting workshops and the branding workshops at the SAG foundation and budgeting classes like Managing Cash Flow at the Actors Fund, they’re all great. Many of my closest friends today, I met in those workshops.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
I thought that a university degree in acting meant I didn’t need to continually be in class. I didn’t take an acting class for 15 years (partially because I couldn’t afford it) but I really was depriving myself.
When I finally started class (Stephen Book’s Improvisational Acting Technique for me), I found a community. Taking a class is like going to the gym – when I get an audition, it’s not the first time this week I have stood before a room full of people and not known what the hell was going to happen. It makes me more confident, more fearless. Many of my deepest friendships began there, but in addition to that, I have a cohort who all speak the same training language as I do. We are each others readers for self-tapes, we trust each other, we can direct each other with a shorthand that comes from years in class together.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @therealjoynash
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealjoynash
- Twitter: @joynash
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/joynash
- Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2836286/
