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NYCC 2025: Matthew Waterson Talks With Anime Herald
🕑 Added 2025-12-17 02:09:45 +0000 UTCNote: Due to time constraints, this will be published on Anime Herald's main site on December 18, 2025. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Author: Seth Burn
Editor: Samantha Ferreira
Interview Location: New York Comic Con 2025
Anime Herald: What is your origin story? How did you get into acting, and voice acting specifically?
Matthew Waterson: I started in theater. I went to drama school in the UK. After that, I came to New York. I was doing theater here. I was doing regional theater, some stuff internationally, and Off-Broadway theater. Some off, off, Off-Broadway. I started doing voice overs at the same time. Over the next ten years I was here, I got more and more voice over work. It seemed like the natural next step was to try and get into anime and video games. That was going to be on the west coast, so I went over there about ten years ago. It sort of worked out. I’ve been able to work just as a voice actor since then.
Anime Herald: Did you want to be an actor when you were a child? Was that what you aspired to be?
Matthew Waterson: It was one of them, yeah. I didn’t know about voice acting, specifically. I just knew about acting. There are some people who knew that they always wanted to be voice actors. That was their plan. It was like that for me. But, I realized, I spent all of my nights as a kid going to sleep listening to The Moon Show. It was a BBC Radio show from the 1960s, with Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe. It was kind of like a company show where they all did eight characters. The characters would sing in every show, but it was all different who they were and what they did. It was kind of like a rep company. I was listening to these three genius comedians doing voices and characters every night to go to sleep, so it actually probably provided a pretty good background in this kind of stuff.
Anime Herald: How did your parents feel about you becoming a thespian?
Matthew Waterson: My parents work in entertainment. My dad is a TV executive. My mother was his associate director for live television. My parents had different concerns from most parents.
My parents’ concerns were, “Great! You do understand that the actors who you know are the tiny sliver who can actually make a living. The ones who we know are the ones who are on shows. It’s not an accurate representation. To you, you know a whole bunch of actors. But that’s a small sliver. We’re not saying ‘No.’, we’re just saying you need to be aware of what the world is. Having said that, If that’s what you want to do, ‘Great!’”
Anime Herald: You found that out when you were performing in off, off, Off-Broadway.
Matthew Waterson: Yeah. Even before that, yeah.
Anime Herald: Any fun stories from that time?
Matthew Waterson: One of the last shows I did in town was a show from the Mint we did in the Lortel (Lucille Lortel Theatre). It had a big cast. It was with Kristen Johnston and Anna Chlumsky. They were both shockingly, annoyingly good. They were wonderful. I didn’t know them. I had seen Kristen on stage because she had come up with the Atlantic, but I hadn’t seen Anna on stage. I had seen her in on-camera stuff. They were both so good that it made me very frustrated. It was a blast. It was a big cast because it was between twelve to fifteen people.
Anime Herald: In the show (So Help Me God!) did you play an unlikable character?
Matthew Waterson: Yes. It was a show about a theater star from a hundred years ago. That was Kristen’s role. In the show, she was doing a new play. She kept firing everybody because they didn’t measure up. She fires the lead and brings in someone of similar stature, who’s this English actor. She thinks it’s great, there’s someone to match me. It becomes difficult because there’s someone else with an equal ego. It becomes a challenge. I would arrive. Everything would be really great. All of a sudden it rapidly falls apart. She decides “Get rid of him too!”
I get to come in, have a bunch of scenes with her, there’s a big fight, then I storm off and that’s it.
Anime Herald: That’s wonderful. I’m glad you got to experience that.
Matthew Waterson: It was great.
Anime Herald: Tell us about your experience with Hades II
Matthew Waterson: I hadn’t played the first game. I got a call, “Hey, can you come and do this?” Reading the character was just a blast. He’s on the grumpy, taciturn, and impatient side. I always thought I had range, and then I realized every single character on this table is like that. They all sound different, but there’s a certain character trait that is apparently common to what I do. It was really fun to get to do Heracles. Being a demi-god is so unimaginably condescending. That’s always fun to do.
Anime Herald: When you’re a demi-god, you get to look down on humans, but you have to look up to gods. It’s very frustrating.
Matthew Waterson: You have to look up to gods, but you don’t think you should. They think you’re only a demi-god, so you’re below them, but you’re going “No, no…”
Anime Herald: He certainly is.
Matthew Waterson: Yeah. That was a fun take. His response is just “No.”
Anime Herald: Do you remember the audition process at all?
Matthew Waterson: I don’t. I’m very lucky. My representatives are excellent. I will sometimes have anywhere between five and twenty auditions a night, across anime, video games, and promotion art. It’s not unusual to do anywhere between fifty and one hundred auditions a week. Frequently, you won’t hear about things for months. You send in your audition, they make their decisions, and you don’t hear. The majority of the time when I book stuff, when I go to do the session, I have to ask “Do you have the audition? Because I don’t remember what I did.”
I’ll go to look it up on my own, and sometimes I can’t find it because I have a hard drive with thousands of auditions. Ten years in, I have thousands and thousands of auditions. I’m very fortunate in that I work a good amount, but I work a tiny amount compared to the number that I audition for. I’m at around a 3% hit rate. I just send so much in.
Anime Herald: That’s amazing. “What do you do for a living?” “I’m an actor… I’m an auditioner. I’ll act occasionally, but I’m an auditioner. That’s what I do.”
Matthew Waterson: That’s what all but ten people are. There are a few people in the world who just get offers, between movies and TV. They are actors. Everyone else is just an auditioner.
Anime Herald: Did they give you a list of 100 lines and how to say them, and you just work through them one-by-one?
Matthew Waterson: Usually, yeah. A lot of times with video games, you don’t get the script ahead of time. Sometimes you do. Some of the times it will be a Zoom session and they’ll put the script up on the Zoom for you to read. If there was an audition, you’ll listen to it. You’ll play around with the voice for a few lines until everyone says, “We like that voice, that’s what we’re looking for.” And then you just start.
Usually, you’ll do an A and a B take, sometimes an A, B, and C of every line. The director will make adjustments. Then they’ll call their script assistant and you’ll just work through it. Some big scripts are hundreds of lines. Some are shorter. A game like Hades doesn’t have effects. A game like Doom, or Call of Duty, or Halo, you do. So you’ll have to do all of the lines, and then all of the punches, kicks, getting punched, getting kicked, getting shot, getting stabbed, getting drowned, getting burned, getting electrocuted, getting buried alive. You’ve got all of that kind of stuff.
Anime Herald: That’s got to be fun.
Matthew Waterson: It’s a lot of fun.
Anime Herald: X-Men '97, what was your experience there?
Matthew Waterson: It was crazy. I spent the first six months working on it terrified, convinced I was going to get fired. Because I was coming in, taking over for someone who was beloved. Someone who did the iteration of the voice that people hear in their heads when they read the comics. To come in and take over for David (Hemblen), who passed away in 2020, I felt that I had to match that and not screw it up. It was a lot.
The way that the show works is that we would record stuff, and then they would re-write it. The first couple of times I would come back and they would say “Hey, we’re going to redo that scene.” I would be like “What did I do wrong?”
They were great. “No, no, we adjusted the writing, so we have to re-record it.”
For the first six months of sessions, I came out of every one convinced I was going to get canned. Not because of anything they’d done, just…
Anime Herald: My thought is that they didn’t fire David. They just needed a replacement. It’s not like the fans are going to blame you.
Matthew Waterson: Sure. But you don’t want to let down what somebody did or what people expect.
Anime Herald: Is there anything else you’d like to share?
Matthew Waterson: We have seasons two and three of X-Men '97 coming out. My wife had a lot of family in the military. She and I are under tighter NDAs than they are. Most of the other stuff I have worked on I am not allowed to talk about.
Anime Herald: I understand. Thank you for talking with us, it was a pleasure.
Matthew Waterson: Thank you.
