Lucille Valentine
Actor
The Silt Verses (2021-)
Role
“Paige.”
Bio
“Lucille Valentine (she/her) is a queer, transgender voice actor, poet, and sensitivity consultant from Arizona currently living in Florida. Hear her acting in podcasts such as The Silt Verses, Inn Between, and Among the Stars and Bones. Her writing has been featured in Vulture Bones, the ‘Midnight Library’ episode of The Cryptonaturalist, and forthcoming magazines.”
“…find the shared experience between you and your character. . ”
How did you become aware of the shows?
“I find out about shows through all sorts of avenues. I’ve come across calls for auditions circulating around the fiction podcasting corner of the website formerly known as Twitter, websites such as https://www.castingcall.club/, or announced within an episode of something to which I was listening.”
What would be your dream project?
“Goodness, I don’t know. It could be anything! Anything that feels like something or someone with which I haven’t yet had the chance to play.
I acted in a special event for the Zombies, Run! mobile game where I was only making horrible monster noises for an hour, which was honestly some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a recording booth..”
How did you land the role?
“This is actually quite funny. So, for The Silt Verses, I’d initially auditioned for the lead role, which ended up rightfully going to the devastatingly talented Méabh de Brún.
While I didn’t get the part, the showrunners Jon and Muna liked my audition so much that they offered me the role of Paige. However, they (bless their hearts, I love them dearly) forgot to actually email me the offer until it had come time to record the episode in which I was to debut.
This all made for a delightfully hectic onboarding process that I would happily do again in a heartbeat.”
How does acting for audio compare to other media, for you? Any skills or techniques you’d recommend learning?
“So, I’d actually never acted prior to being cast in my first podcast role back in the middle-ish 2010s, and I’ve still yet to do any ‘face acting’ as a friend once put it.
My biggest recommendations are to practice your breathing, because if you aren’t careful (as I wasn’t when I first started) your every gasping breath will be caught on mic. Other than that, learning how to imbue emotion into your lines is paramount, because the audience doesn’t have the visual cues from other types of media to give them insight into the character.
Learning some very basic audio editing skills—just enough so you know how to clip out bad takes or monitor your levels—can only help you and your future colleagues.”
If your character is a member of the regular cast, how do you keep them fresh to play?
“For me, it always helps to find the thread of similarity or shared experience between you and your character. Even with characters who have wildly different lives from yours, there will be something in them that will resonate with you, even if you have dig deep to find it.
My character from Inn Between, Rosie, is a drow who faked her disappearance and ran away from home to become a thief—the basis for my identification with Rosie comes from the shared character flaws of using avoidant behaviors to run from our problems, and that we both have weird, complicated relationships with our mothers (I’m working on it in therapy, don’t @ me).”