At first glance, one might not think much of the unassuming lady sitting at the table, directing fans to available seats as they pile into the small conference room. She is soft-spoken, stands 5 feet tall, and reminds me of the sweet aunt that comes to Christmas every year with extra gifts. I always loved that aunt. She bought me Super Mario 3 for the original Nintendo when I was a kid and she’s always been my favorite. But back to the unassuming lady at the table. You wouldn’t know it by her casual demeanor, but she is 8 time Emmy award-winning Andrea Romano and she is responsible for a tremendous part of our childhoods.

Andrea started off as most of us did, with giant dreams and small means. She was a young girl, from eastern Long Island, with aspirations of being somehow involved in the entertainment industry. After spinning her wheels on the east coast, she moved to California and became an assistant to a voice director. After about 4 months she was franchised as the youngest voice talent agent ever. From there she took her talents to a company you might have heard of called Hanna Barbera. There she would go on to cast the voices for a number of big hit cartoon shows. To name a few…Smurfs, Snorks, Muppet Babies, and Popeye and Son. It wasn’t long before word spread of her success. Fred Wolfe approached her with an offer to cast a new offbeat project that was little known at the time called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Unfortunately at the time, she was contracted with HB and they wouldn’t let her collaborate with competitors. But all things usually do come full circle and Ka is a wheel, thus she will be casting the new TMNT cartoon show in the coming months.
Soon after, a number of Andrea’s friends from Hanna Barbera decided to Splinter off(ha see what I did there) and form Warner Brothers. They asked Romano to leave her well paid secure job with benefits and insurance to become a freelance voice director with them. Of course, she agreed and went on to cast such classic hits as Batman: The animated series, Tiny Tunes, Pinky and the Brain, and Animaniacs.
Andrea sees around 1500 auditions per project and calls back around 200 to 500 before eventually narrowing it down to around 5 before she makes her final decision. For Tiny Tunes, there were two standout auditions that she knew she wanted to cast but ended up passing on because she had the intuition to know their voices would be going threw those lovely changes of puberty in the coming months. Those voices belonged to none other than Leonardo Dicaprio and Giovanni Ribisi. Her advice to young aspiring artists is encouraging but realistic. Take acting classes, then take voice classes, make a demo tape, get an agent, and then have your agent send you to her. And she has a special piece of advice to the ladies in the crowd, telling them that there are not a lot of women doing this line of work. Women in this industry are a commodity, especially talented ones. So get your demo tapes together and go for it. It’s a lucrative and satisfying career path. And if you eventually get to work with people like Andrea Romano as a boss, then it probably doesn’t feel like work at all.