Personal Voice Mail Greetings

When people I meet find out that I’m a voice actor, one of the most popular questions they ask is “what’s your favorite job?”.  While it’s not always easy to remember in the moment, I think my favorite type of project is recording personal voice mail greetings.

But, that’s not to say I only enjoy recording voicemails.  I love working with my skills as an impressionist.  I’ve matched at least a couple hundred voices for film trailer ADR and movie marketing.  I’m pretty good at it, and those projects are usually short pieces with immediate turnaround.

Commercial jobs are fantastic.  I enjoy working with marketers and producers to find just the right pacing, tone, and delivery.  Commercials can provide ongoing work, especially with clients who run branding schedules in multiple markets and mediums.

Internal corporate voice over is amazing.  I love doing introductions for speakers, recorded announcements for company events, and trade-show video narrations.

But there’s one type of project that I’ve always loved producing from the very start of my career.  Personal voice mail greetings.

When I was a kid, I remember seeing commercials on television for wacky answering machine messages.  You could buy an entire cassette tape of funny characters and celebrity impersonations telling callers to leave their messages after the beep.  You just popped the tape into your home answering machine, and callers would be greeted by what sounded like a celebrity telling the caller to leave a message.  There wasn’t usually a personalized context to the greeting, as these tapes weren’t customized, but you get the gist.

I can produce over 50 accurate celebrity impressions,  the list below contains the most popular and/or accurate.  There are undoubtedly some that I’m not remembering or forgetting to include – so if you have one in mind (but don’t see it on the list), just ask.  If you’re interested in having me record a personal-use voicemail greeting in a celebrity style, it just takes a moment to contact me and get more info.

Jeff Goldblum
Matthew McConaughey
Morgan Freeman
Barack Obama
John Madden
James Earl Jones
Jon Hamm
Liam Neeson
Patrick Stewart
Donald Sutherland
Sam Elliott
Winston Churchill
Mr. T
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Christopher Walken
David Attenborough
John Malkovich
Ray Romano
Jerry Seinfeld
David Letterman
Gary Sinise
Donald Trump
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
Will Lyman
Michael Douglas
Ian McShane
Billy Bob Thornton
Bryan Cranston
Alec Baldwin
Edward Norton
Michael Caine