SAFIYYA INGAR ON WHAT EVERY ACTOR WANTS TO KNOW ABOUT VOICE ACTING
Updated: Oct 26
Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa
SAFIYYA INGAR X AKTA
I am fascinated by acceptance speeches.
Not because of the awards. Not because of the glamour. Not even because of the people giving them. I am fascinated by the names. The names of mothers and fathers. The drama teachers. The older siblings. The youth theatres. The mentors.
The people sitting at home who will never stand on a stage themselves yet somehow still find themselves standing there through somebody else. Success has an incredibly moving way of making ghosts visible. Somebody wins an award and suddenly an audience of millions is introduced to the invisible architecture of a life.
So often we are sold a fantasy of self-sufficiency. We celebrate the actor who books the role, the writer who publishes the book, the artist who finally breaks through. We talk about determination and resilience and hard work as though human beings are solitary creatures capable of willing themselves into existence. Yet every meaningful thing that has happened in my own life traces itself back to another person. Someone who encouraged me. Someone who taught me.
Someone who opened a door. Someone who believed in me.
The older I get, I am less interested in talent and moved by generosity. Talent can build a career. Generosity builds a culture. Talent might change a single life. Generosity creates a chain reaction. One person shares a piece of knowledge, extends an opportunity, sends an email, makes an introduction, offers encouragement at exactly the right moment, and years later their fingerprints are still visible on lives they may never fully realise they shaped.
When I sat down with actor and writer Safiyya Ingar, I found myself thinking about those fingerprints. About the people who choose to leave ladders behind them instead of pulling them up. About the extraordinary power of somebody looking at another person and recognising possibility where others have overlooked it.
Safiyya is no stranger to crossing worlds. Audiences may know them from Netflix's The Witcher, from their work as Valarie Lockwood, the original companion to the Eleventh Doctor in Big Finish's Doctor Who audio universe, or from their acclaimed stage work in productions such as Maggots at the Bush Theatre. In the world of voice acting, they have become one of the industry's most exciting talents, voicing Abby in the global gaming phenomenon Wuthering Waves and recently being recognised with a Best Non-Binary Voice Performance award.
But what struck me most was not the breadth of their credits. It was the generosity with which they spoke about the people behind them. This is a conversation about one of those people. But it is also a conversation about what we owe each other. About how careers are rarely built alone. About the quiet, radical act of reaching back for somebody else when you've finally found your footing.
SAFIYYA INGAR X AKTA
AKTA: You move between screen, theatre, audio drama and video games so fluidly. Do those worlds feel connected to you, or does each one demand a completely different version of yourself as an actor?
SAFIYYA INGAR: They all demand something different technically, but at the core of everything I do is the same thing: me.
That sounds obvious, but I think acting can sometimes become mystified. There's this idea that you have to become an actor in order to belong in these spaces, and I’ve always pushed back against that a little. Partly because I care deeply about access. I come from a low socioeconomic background. I didn't grow up around people in the industry. I wasn't taking endless acting classes or dance lessons. A lot of this world was something I had to discover for myself.
Because of that, I've always felt strongly that the most valuable thing you can bring into a room is yourself. Your perspective. Your voice. Your way of moving through the world. My messaging, both in my work and in my life, is always to be as authentic as you can be.
A lot of my career has been baptism by fire. I've moved between projects, mediums and disciplines mostly by following my instincts. Following my nose a little bit and trusting where the work was leading me. I never sat down with some grand master plan. I just kept saying yes to things that felt exciting and meaningful, and I've been lucky enough that it's taken me into lots of different spaces.
I'm also neurodivergent, and my brain has always worked a million miles an hour. In a funny way, that suits the life I've built. No two days look the same. One day I'll be in a recording booth, the next I'll be on set, then I'll be doing a rehearsed reading somewhere. The variety keeps me energised. But regardless of the medium, I think the thing that remains constant is that I'm trying to bring my whole self to the work. That's the thread that connects everything.
AKTA: Do you remember the moment you realised voice work wasn’t just “another skill” but potentially a major part of your career?
SAFIYYA INGAR: This is really a story about mentorship. During lockdown, voice actor Alix Wilton Regan, who has worked on everything from Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed to Tomb Raider (as the new voice actor for Lara Croft), launched a mentorship programme for women and fem-presenting people from underrepresented communities. She wanted to use her experience, resources and platform to bring new voices into the industry.
A friend sent me the application and honestly, I almost didn't apply. I was carrying crippling residual anxiety from drama school and had convinced myself voice acting wasn't something I was particularly good at. But I sent in my materials anyway. Alix narrowed hundreds of applicants down to a small group and auditioned us personally. I remember finishing my audition and her just looking at me and saying, "How are you not already doing this?"
It completely threw me. Nobody had ever said that to me before.
Alix took five of us under her wing and spent months teaching us everything. Performance, contracts, rates, reels, industry etiquette. She didn't charge us a penny. All she asked for was our time, commitment and professionalism. Then, at the end of the programme, she introduced us to the studios she worked with and encouraged us to step into those rooms ourselves.
What moves me most looking back is that she genuinely wanted us to succeed at her level. She used to say, "I want you to take my jobs." She was deeply conscious of the barriers facing women of colour in the industry and wanted to create tangible change, not just conversations about change. She wanted us earning those rates, occupying those spaces and telling those stories.
Around that time, I built my first recording booth inside the wardrobe of the flat I shared with my parents and six siblings. It was held together with blankets, pillows and pure determination. The only reason I could afford the equipment was because a tour I'd been due to go on was cancelled during the pandemic, and the furlough payment from that job allowed me to invest in the setup. I recorded my first reels in that wardrobe and ended up making my first five thousand pounds from voice acting there. When I look back now, it feels slightly unbelievable.
At the same time, another huge champion of mine was Chris Hopkins. We'd worked together years earlier on Holes, and he'd always told me he thought I had a future in voice acting. After the mentorship, I got back in touch and he helped connect me with the agent I'm still with today.
So when people ask how I got into voice acting, the answer is talent and hard work, yes, but it's also community. It's Alix. It's Chris. It's people who recognised something in me before I fully recognised it in myself. They opened the door, and then trusted me to walk through it.
AKTA: A lot of actors secretly fantasise about voice work because it appears freer: freer from beauty politics, freer from typecasting, freer from the camera itself. But I wonder if that’s actually true, or whether the industry simply relocates those pressures somewhere less visible?
SAFIYYA INGAR: Oh, absolutely. I talk about this quite a lot because unfortunately those pressures don't just disappear.
As someone from a global majority background, I don't get the privilege of walking into every room and assuming every role is available to me. That still exists. There are still conversations around representation, around who gets seen, around who gets trusted to tell certain stories.
But what I will say is that voice acting feels a lot less hostile.When I'm in a booth, I get the job with this. [points to voice] Not with this [points to face]. I'm not worrying about whether a costume fits me. I'm not worrying about how old I look, how skinny I look, any of that stuff. It's just me and a microphone. And honestly? That's incredibly liberating.
I think some of my best acting is my voice work and I don't think that's a coincidence. I'm not getting bogged down by everything else. I'm just thinking about the work. I get to go, "Okay, let's see what I've got." And then I can just let it rip.
It's also made me much better at advocating for myself. That's something Alix really instilled in all of us. Not being difficult. Not being a diva. Just saying, "This is what I need to do my job well." And what I've actually found is that people respond really positively to that. They'll often say, "Thank you for asking." And I'm like, "No, thank you for listening."
The other beautiful thing is that the mentorship never really ended. The five of us are still incredibly close. We champion each other, we support each other, we hype each other up. Whether it's work, life, relationships, anxiety, outfits, whatever it is, we're there for each other. We protect each other. And honestly, in an industry like this, that's priceless.
"They all demand something different technically, but at the core of everything I do is the same thing: me.
AKTA: If somebody reading this wants to get into voice acting, what's the advice you wish you'd had at the beginning? What should they focus on first?
SAFIYYA INGAR: The biggest thing is being honest with yourself. And that's actually harder than it sounds because it requires two things at once: being honest about your strengths, but also being kind enough to yourself to recognise the things you might be capable of that you haven't discovered yet.
For years, I thought I was only ever going to play goblins, little creatures and teenage boys. Then people started pointing out other qualities in my voice. They'd say, "No, you've got depth. You've got warmth. You've got mystery." Learning to look at my voice more objectively completely changed the way I approached the work.
So my first piece of advice is: figure out what your voice actually does well. Not just what voices you can do, but what you can sustain. Could you perform that character for three hours? Could you come back six months later and find that voice again? Could you build a career around it?
The second thing is understanding that you're a business. Voice acting is creative, but it's also practical. Maybe your lane is video games. Maybe it's audiobooks. Maybe it's animation. Maybe it's commercials, which is a very good bag to be in, I'm not gonna lie. Figure out where your voice naturally fits and build from there.
And then, practically speaking, get a good reel together and, if you can afford it comfortably, invest in some basic equipment. It doesn't have to be fancy. You don't need to bankrupt yourself. What matters most is having material that genuinely represents what you do well.
The final thing is not to compare your journey to anyone else's. I struggle with access questions sometimes because my route into voice acting was so unusual. I was incredibly lucky. I met the right people at the right time and had mentors who opened doors for me. But what I've learned is that everybody's path looks different.
Recently, somebody spoke to me about identifying the "unmovable" parts of yourself. The things that sit at your core. The things you're unwilling to compromise on. I think that's the real work. Figure out what those things are, trust your instincts and keep going. It'll be hard sometimes. You'll hear no a lot. But if you stay connected to that core part of yourself, you'll find your way.
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