ALA19 Interview: Caitlin Glass
If there was ever time to be intimidated and encouraged by boss lady energy, that is when I got to interview Caitlin Glass. Glass is a high level boss. She not only has an extensive history of voicing acting major characters in a variety of anime and video games but she is also an ADR Director. It was an honor to interview Glass during Anime Los Angeles and learn about her history and what it means to be ADR Director.
SQUEEDAR: if you could introduce yourself and give us a little background of yourself
CAITLIN GLASS: My name is Caitlin glass, I'm an anime voice actress. Video, game, voice actress, and also ADR Voice director primarily for Crunchyroll. I’ve been voice acting for about 20 years.
Mostly people know me as Winry Rockbell from Fullmetal Alchemist, Haruhi Fujioka from Ouran High School Host Club, Cammy White from the Street Fighter games for Five and Six. Currently I'm playing Mina Ashido in My Hero Academia for the last handful of years. And also Damian Desmond in Spy x Family. And continuing to be Nefertari Vivi in One Piece, which is having a big renaissance of popularity right now, which is great. Many, many more but those are the bigger ones.
SQUEEDAR: Personally, I'm very excited because I also love Ouran High school Host Club! So one of the things I had to look up was ADR. I'm pretty sure a lot of people aren't familiar with it. What is ADR and what does it mean to be an ADR director?
GLASS: ADR means “additional dialogue replacement” or “automated dial replacement”, sometimes but additional dialogue.
So people aren't familiar with the term, but they really are familiar with it If they've seen absolutely any movie ever. Live action utilizes ADR all the time. It's like after a shot has been configured and edited, maybe the sound isn't so great, from a certain camera angle.
So the actors will have to come in and re-record their lines on top of you know, to just fill in blanks. Sometimes celebrities have voice matches like people who can perform their voice, but a lot of the time, they'll do it themselves. That's what ADR is and it exists in everything that you watch TV shows, movies etc.
In cartoons and in the world of anime ADR is just a fancy word for dubbing. It means dubbing. We are taking one language and replacing it with another language. So I direct and cast actors in that capacity.
SQUEEDAR: How did you get into that? It seems like a very niche portion, but it's a very specific kind of thing. Did you always want to do ADR or did you just stumble upon it?
GLASS: I wanted to work further in anime and was enjoying the voice acting work that I'd been doing for about a year. I have a degree in Theater and directed actors on the stage while in college. It just seemed like something I could try out. I was looking into it just out of interest like what other jobs can I do that my degree would support. As opposed to going and working retail or waiting tables, lI was really determined to not do those things.
Directing it just kind of happened. I was able to learn on the job at FUNimation. I started in 2005 directing
SQUEEDAR: How is it like when you direct for like an anime or like a project where the first language is not English? Do you have to talk to the original crew? How do you go about directing it?
GLASS: In a company like FUNimation, now Crunchyroll, you are supported by all of these other departments. So there's a department who deals with the translation. There's another department who deals with the adaptation of the script to match the animation. You can’t change the animation, so you need the translation to fit into the way the mouth is animated and that is the job of the ADR writing team and then it comes to me with an engineer and the actor.
That's it. It's usually three people at a time: me, the engineer, and the actor. One character at a time is recorded, so you go through all of that one character's lines. Matching them up to the animation that's in place and you help the actor through it because they don't always have other actors to perform with in their scenes if those people haven't recorded yet. They also don't watch the episode in advance. It's not like being in a play or a tv show or a movie where you have a whole script and you can read it and you know the end from the beginning. They see what they're working on for the first time when they get there.
It's up to the director to help let them know all of the given circumstances and everything that went on before. Here's your character's headspace right now. You're the guide.
SQUEEDAR: Whoa! That's a lot of work! This is very time consuming with one actor at a time.
GLASS: (laughs) It is.
SQUEEDAR: Of all the voice acting roles that you've done, what has been the most positive reaction from fans.
GLASS: Over the years, it's definitely been Haruhi Fujioka in Ouran. Winry is pretty popular too and is the character that I have played the longest. Not like every day consistently for the last 20 years or anything, but I first played Winry in 2004 and last played Winry in 2023. Because I've also done all of the live action, Full Metal Alchemist movies I've dubbed as Winry too. Plus Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, two animated movies, three live action movies.Winry is very special and it's cool to get to play a character for so long.
But then Haruhi seems to mean the most to so many people. Ouran High School Host Club is an anime that is a lot of people's first anime. They discovered it because it lived on Netflix for so long. It's so weird and goofy and friends introduced their non-anime friends to anime with Ouran High School Host Club and I love that. I love being a part of it.
It's weird, folks come to my table and they're like you're a part of my childhood or you're the voice of my childhood, like I am not that old but okay. I get it, I get it. Some of them you were not born yet when I started voice acting.
I watched anime when I was a young teen and a teenager as well.That's when Sailor Moon was on Toonami in the afternoon and what it was like to get together with your friends. You each had your favorite scout and the one that was, you know, and then to see that's what Ouran High School Host Club was for a lot of people because it here’s this group and there's the Tamaki of your friend group and the twins of your friend group.
That's really neat. People quote it and they know the dub like backwards and forwards and this is wild.
SQUEEDAR: Well, now I gotta ask: which Sailor Scout were you?
GLASS: Mars!
SQUEEDAR: Juggling all these multiple characters, I've always wondered how do you maintain that character's voice so consistently throughout the years?
GLASS: When you have to get back in the booth and perform it, you have a reference. You've recorded it before so they play it for you and you just need to match that. If your voice is changing over time, you just got to figure it out! (laughs) or make it work.
SQUEEDAR: It’s kind of like muscle memory a little bit?
GLASS: A little bit is like muscle memory, for sure.
SQUEEDAR: You have this wonderful wealth of knowledge and experience. Can you give a retrospective view of the industry in general?
GLASS: It's really awesome to see how much anime has grown and popularity in the west and become. less niche and more mainstream.
You can walk into a Target or a Walmart and buy anime T-shirts in that section where they have the graphic tees instead of it just being some random corner of a video store or something. A lot of people at least now know what anime is, even if they don't watch it, which is pretty cool.
I honestly cannot go shopping anywhere, anywhere without seeing someone in anime clothing, anywhere. Any mall, any regular store. They're all over the place. So, that's really cool to see how it's grown that way. We also have so much more access to so many more shows legally, which is wonderful. I really hope that the advent of streaming has done a lot to curb piracy because that's the best way to support the industry in Japan and to keep it going.
It is on the more negative side because there is a negative to all of it. The output and the amount that consumers want to consume, it's a little hard to keep up with on our end but we work hard to raise the bar for dubs. And people just still want them so much more and so more quickly. So there's a concern that actors and directors will get burnt out.
So we'll see. We'll see what happens but we'll still work really hard to keep especially the really big highly anticipated titles. Which is just be super great. And I hope the people keep watching.
SQUEEDAR: In the early days when you started dubbing versus now, has it evolved so much that you have to be careful like how you dub? Is there anything that you have to hyper-aware of? People have so much more access to like voice actors
GLASS: We have to be a lot more careful. Now, there's social media and there was barely social media in 2004. There was Facebook, and it wasn't the same then.
If you had fans who liked anime or anime friends, you had a chat or a weird group. It wasn't how it is now. Like with followers following you because you're an actor. There is just a lot of weight put on what you're posting on your social media, what the companies you work for see you posting. In the world of anime, the stuff we work on doesn't belong to us, it doesn't belong to Crunchyroll, it belongs to the license source.
So, we do have to be really careful. We're all under NDA’s, people get excited about the stuff they're working on, it can be a little bit scary. There's also some very negative interactions with fans because of the internet. Social media is awful, just stay away from it! (laughs) That's what we've all decided. This is toxic. This is necessary evil unfortunately.
The other thing that's really different is that we used to work on shows long after they came out. I say ‘long after’ that makes it sound like it's been a decade or something. But a show would be fully complete, 100% released and it could be six months to a year after it's completion, when we're finally starting the dub. That was neat because as a director and an actor, you knew the end from the beginning. Then you would work on the whole show all at once.
Now, we do things one episode at a time. So, it's a difference between baking a dozen cookies or baking a dozen cookies one cookie at a time.
SQUEEDAR: For your upcoming panel “Women In the Industry” [hosted by Emma Fyffe with Guests: Tara Sands, Kari Wahlgren, Lizzie Freeman, and Kayleigh McKee], can you share what your hoping to pass on to fans that attend the panel?
GLASS: I hope I encourage people.
SQUEEDAR: Any piece of advice for anyone who's not sure about entering the industry?
GLASS: Don't. If you're not sure, don't! (laughs) It's really competitive and difficult. If you're talking about being a voice actor, or a voice director or something, and you're not sure about it, don't do it.S
SQUEEDAR: Honestly, that's very good advice! Quite honestly. Thank you so much.
To follow Caitlin Glass, check out her official website: https://wwww.caitlinglass.com/
