We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ashley Quills. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ashley below.

Hi Ashley, thanks for joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

Learning to be a voice actor was a somewhat blind dive into the unknown! It was around August 2020, a few months into the pandemic, and I saw voice over memes from people like Gianni Matragrano and Luke Correia and thought “why not?” I’d already enjoyed playing things like Dungeons & Dragons with friends, getting to roleplay and act out characters, and this was almost like the next step up from there.

So I started doing my own voice over memes, slowly picking away at it until I had the luck to meet Antonio Greco through my friend Mia Cruddas, he’s a voice actor of many projects, but the one I knew him for was Warframe as Erra. I spoke to him about getting started as a voice actor, and he put me on the path as my mentor and coach, pushed me to learn and try new things, and recommended other folks to learn from like Victoria Atkin and her voice over classes. I gotta say, it was somewhat terrifying to be 6 months into voice acting, sat on a zoom call with a bunch of professionals, and Roger Clarke (Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2) joins up to be the guest coach for the evening!

Taking higher level classes like that early on was definitely a steep learning curve, but every teacher and coach I’ve had was incredibly kind and worked with me at my skill level, and taught me a lot of the skills that stick with me today. Classes remain to me the most important part of improving as an actor. They give you a chance to really push yourself and try something new, and potentially pick up all new skills, and if anything I wish I’d done more of them early on!

They can be scary, like any performance done in front of others, but everyone there is experiencing the same thing, and you’re all there to learn, and even if you flub a line or have to start over, that’s just part of any performance, and everyone does it! Even for me, I find myself shaking like a leaf when I’m in a class, but completely zen once a live recording session has started.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Hey! I’m Ashley Heather Quills, also known online as Voice Quills, and I’m a voice actor and somewhat of a YouTuber! I’ve mainly done work for indie video games, but have also dipped into podcasts, audio dramas and animations!

Things really picked up for me around 2022 or so, after a bunch of YouTube videos exploded in views, leading to a lot of work from people who’d seen my voice over content. The main thing that really helped me stick out was that, being a trans woman, I could swap back and forth between really gruff, low male voices, and relatively soft, high female voices, as well as all the inbetweens! More than a few times people would ask who else was in the video and I’d get to, slightly smugly, reply that all the voices were me! I even get to do this today with some of my more professional roles, like in Warframe, where I voiced a batch of both male and female NPCs for the Abyssal Zone mission.

Being an openly trans voice actor has also led to a lot of other trans people reaching out to me and both thanking me for just being myself and putting myself out there, auditioning and voicing all these roles, and for giving them the confidence to explore their own identity or express it further. It’s a massive privilege for people to see me as an inspirational figure, and to reach out directly and thank me for just being myself, it’s really emotional for me, knowing that I’m having an impact on people and helping to inspire them even if all I’m really doing is being myself.

It’ll always be an immense pleasure to be able to jump into the booth and bring these characters and their stories to life, whether it’s an indie production or a AAA one, seeing how people resonate with the characters and share in the emotion of it all is absolutely fantastic, and it’s something I strive for whenever I get in the booth to record. It’s part of the whole acting part of voice acting, it’s not just putting on a voice or an accent, you want to portray the feelings and thoughts of the character, and having people pick up on all the little decisions and spur of the moment things that make it real, like a character stumbling over their words in a tense moment, or sounding stuffy after a scene where they cry, it’s part of what makes it more human to me, and it’s something I always strive to add to my performances.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

One of the things that can be really difficult about being a voice actor is the waiting. Time is always ticking, and it’s a steady, rough thing sometimes. You’re either waiting for auditions to come through, or waiting to hear back from an audition you’ve sent, or waiting for an agency to get back to you, waiting, waiting, waiting. There are always busy and quiet periods in any business, but it can feel especially hard when the core of what you do is your own performance.

After booking Warframe, which had been my dream game to be in since I started voice acting, I was so certain this would open the floodgates, that now I was in this big dream project of mine the work would start to flood in and I would’ve “made it”.

That, did not occur. In fact, the time after booking Warframe, was some of the quietest it has ever been for me as a voice actor. There were barely any auditions coming through, and while I did have some wins like getting an agency with BigMouth Voices, work was so incredibly slow I really began to doubt my own work, and wonder if I’d simply peaked and that was it.

But, time is always ticking, and slowly, things began to pick up again. I had more people reaching out to me for work, I was getting added to more rosters, there were more auditions coming through. Now, I’m starting to get busier than ever!

It’s never easy having to just *wait*, but that quiet time is also perfect for honing yourself. If you’re a voice actor, it’s a great time to adjust your resume, sign up for classes and workshops, and do some personal projects to keep yourself sharp! There is always something to do to keep yourself busy as a voice actor, even when the industry itself is being quiet.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

In the past my main goal was to be in Warframe, a goal I’d had set since I first took a class with Victoria Atkin when I’d just started, and 2 and half years later I was stood in a studio recording lines for it, so since then I’ve had to come up with some new goals!

Now, I’m indecisive a lot of the time, so rather than just pick the one new goal I’ve set a bucket list of things I’d love to be a part of and steadily try to work towards them all depending on where my whims are taking me.

I could list them all off, to be in more games with dinosaurs, to be in a Warhammer project, to be back in Warframe again, to be in an Elder Scrolls game, to be in a Final Fantasy 14 expansion, to be in an Ace Combat/Project Wingman game, the list goes on and on! Some of these are just gonna be luck, not many folks are making games with dinosaurs in them, so I’ve just gotta keep an eye out! As for the bigger projects, like Elder Scrolls and Final Fantasy, that’s where I’ve really gotta put the work in. I’ll need to keep my skills sharp with classes and workshops, keep pushing for more agency rep and try to get my demo reel and resume in front of the folks who do the casting for these games.

But beyond the material goal of wanting to be in certain projects, I just really hope the work I do resonates with people, and can help inspire others to give voice acting a shot. I’ve met more than a few trans people who think that their chance at being a voice actor is gone, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The industry is always looking for new, unique voices, and to me the more trans representation we have in the industry the better.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.voice-quills.com/
• Twitter: https://x.com/VoiceQuills
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@VoiceQuills
• Other: https://bsky.app/profile/voicequills.bsky.social