all voice talents are steve whitmire
There’s on old saying that you haven’t really worked in radio until you’ve been fired.
True of my old business, but for my current business I’ve always felt the saying should be you haven’t really worked in voiceover until you’ve been hired…for the day. The next day, until you get a VO job, you’re still not a voice talent.
Steve Whitmire, who has worked with Jim Henson’s Muppets since 1978, has been the puppeteer and voice of Kermit THE Frog since Jim Henson’s death in 1990.
We found out this week that Whitmire had been fired from that job in October of 2016. He evidently kept the dismissal quiet in the hopes the Muppet executives would have a change of heart.
As of this writing, they have not.
Just a brief background, before I get to the meat of this post.
When Jim Henson died, I kind of lost my interest in the Muppets. Not out of any disrespect for those that continued after him but just cause when I saw Kermit in a show or movie, I knew Jim Henson wasn’t there. I know I am not supposed to think of the actors at all when I watch The Muppets, but I do.
I thought of Henson and it made me a bit sad.
Through Henson’s children and the talented puppeteers and writers, the show went on as it should. Steve Whitmire was elevated to the puppeteer and voice of Kermit and has performed admirably. Whitmire should be nothing but proud of his work and how he honored Henson with his interpretation of Kermit.
Under whatever circumstances or whatever ‘new creative direction’ the Disney management (who now owns the Muppets) wanted to move forward in, I don’t know. Whitmire was called and told his services were no longer required. He stated recently that working for the Muppets and being Kermit was very much a way of life, given his tenure and history with both Henson and the company.
This job was clearly very personal to him. I very much respect why that was while also admiring his great talent.
To be clear, I do not know Steve Whitmire.
But to me it seems likely, having read his recent blog post, he’s been living with a great deal of pain and sorrow since October 2016. He may be well over it by now and I hope that’s the case.
It’s a pain and sorrow almost every working voice actor has known at sometime.
I have been there. Maybe you have too or, if not, someday you likely will be.
Though not within anything as incredibly famous and ingrained as Whitmire’s work, I’ve been fired from a few really nice, longer-term voice acting jobs over 35+ years.
Sometimes the firing was because of a “different direction” for the project, a couple of time I screwed up (it happens) and sometimes I just could not give the producers what they wanted, hard as I tried.
That subsequent feeling of failure, depression and fear for the future (“do I even have a career”) after losing one of these gigs can be paralyzing.
‘Get up in the morning?! What for?!’
And yet we must get up in the morning. And the morning after that.
As much as we may identify our lives with our jobs, we are MORE than our jobs.
We have much to offer other clients or in some cases, other industries.
It is SO hard…but we must move on when we lose these big gigs.
We cannot wallow. Wallowing can start to feel good after a while but it leads to excuses, laziness and a list of other not good things. Do. Not. Wallow.
We need to remember what we were like when we got that nice, big voiceover job…what was our attitude, how did we present ourselves, how did we sound?
What was our mindset? Likely, it was that the world was our oyster and we wanted to go out and get the big gigs. We need to do it again. And we can.
Yes, we’ve been handed a slice of humble pie. We ate it and now we move on. Only WE can control our future. But also, WE control our future. That’s pretty cool!
We are voice actors, we have skills, we have talents and we have contacts.
Train, audition, network, market, repeat.
Losing a big gig may FEEL like the end of your world. But it isn’t, as long as you won’t let it be the end of your world.
I hope this helps.
[…] might recall about a year ago I wrote a blog about Muppet puppeteer Steve Whitmire who, it had just been announced, was fired by Disney as the voice of Kermit and had been let go […]