A voice rooted
in patois.
It all started when I was five. My grandmother taught me songs in patois, the old dialect of the Auvergne. I was a shy kid, but the day I sang them for my teacher and watched her eyes light up, I understood what a voice could do.
Singing never left me. I went to business school to please my dad, and spent every weekend singing in bars and cabarets. I then spent a few years as a product manager in cosmetics, but I needed room to breathe, away from the hierarchy and the red tape.
In 2009, my company laid people off overnight, after promising it never would. Something broke. I spent the year trying to figure out what came next, until I stumbled onto an online voice-over course. Something clicked. Two weeks after signing up, my mind was made up: I was leaving it all behind. The company paid for a career assessment, and the counsellor put it plainly: "You're 28. Give it a shot. You'll always have time to go back to a desk job if it doesn't work out." I never went back.
I started out in September 2010, and my very first booking came in on day one: a commercial that called for real acting, exactly what I didn't yet know how to do. It took me almost an hour to get it right. When I sent it over, the client asked me, "Are you sure you're an actor?"
At that point, I wasn't so sure myself. So I decided to learn to act, for real, because one thing never wavered: I was convinced this was the job for me. I worked, and worked, and worked.
And it took off, faster than I'd hoped. Fast enough, at least, to make good on a dream from my student days: in 2014, now that my studio fit inside a laptop, I moved to Madrid. But that wasn't the real luxury. In the corporate world I always needed something new: three or four different jobs in seven years. Voice-over, on the other hand, reinvents itself endlessly, and fifteen years on it still fascinates me just as much. If I had to do it all over, I'd do exactly the same. I can honestly say I made the right call.
Mid-range, clear
and easy to mix.
My voice has a naturally youthful quality and sits comfortably in the 25-40 age range, more mid-range than deep. It sits easily in a mix and stays clear even over bass-heavy music. That's what makes it as comfortable in advertising as in narration.
Meeting Jean-Laurent Cochet changed the way I act. In his class, we worked on La Fontaine's Fables by saying them like in real life. Ever since, I always try to bring more of myself, more of what feels real,, and to avoid the usual voice-over tricks.