final draft

Colin Cassidy.
Colin Cassidy sits across the table from me,
sipping coffee in a hip, spacious ex-warehouse
café in Lavendar Bay. His friendly, relational
personality is quick to fill the room when he
switches from character to character even as he
reveals his journey into voice acting, from Kermit
the Frog to David Attenborough to Donald Trump.
“Voice acting was something I never thought I
would do,” he admits, which is an unexpected
confession given his performative charm and
versatility. “I have a good voice, but it wasn’t
special in any particular sense. I don’t have the
deepest voice or the highest, I just have this range
along with the theatrics and drama to go with it.”
Indeed, he does punctuate our conversation with
sudden but seamless impressions, keeping the
atmosphere light. Having spent time with Colin,
it’s apparent to see how his enthusiasm and
expressive delivery have landed him over three
hundred characters. “I had to come up with a
way to label what my sound was,” he says about
his signature vocal style, the Chatty Gravitas – a
chatty friend meets a trusted advisor. “Everyone
is always the friendly, natural guy. I wanted to
be different and I thought about being the best
I can be, my unique selling point, my point of
difference.”
He reveals later that his first steps into voice
acting were heavily influenced by faith and
Christianity. Interestingly, it was a group of
returning Christian missionaries from Papua New
Guinea that encouraged him to venture into the
radio industry. “At the time, I was on a spiritual
journey. I was trying to find the meaning of life,”
Colin explains, concluding that sentence with an
impression of a spirit guide. It’s a remarkable
insight into his career, how it both began and
ended with Christianity.
This encouragement led him to a job as a radio
announcer and writer at Southern Cross Station,
and meant that Colin was forever rewriting and
producing scripts in large quantities. “I would
write commercials about twelve to fifteen times. I
probably wrote a thousand scripts, just pumping
them out at mass volume. Then I would have to
read the scripts over the phone to get approval
from ad agencies all around Australia.”
He later relocated to the United Kingdom as
the creative director of Global, Europe’s largest
commercial radio company. There, he led a
team of thirteen creative writers and set record
revenues, winning various awards along the way,
including being the London International Ad
Awards finalist for best Radio Artistè.
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