Special Guest - Luanne Regis

Anne Ganguzza (00:05.233)
Hey everyone, welcome to the VO Boss podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I am so excited to be with very special guest, Luanne Regis. Luanne is a veteran voiceover agent and talent agency executive with over 30 years of experience. Her career spans everything voiceover, all voiceover, including...

heading up scale departments at two LA boutique agencies, running the celebrity division at a top bi-coastal theatrical and commercial agency, as well as launching her own Chicago voiceover department in 2007. After a year at Sound and Fury Casting, she now owns and operates her own talent representation agency, Regal V.O. Luanne, thank you so much for joining me today.

Luanne Regis (00:57.621)
and thank you for having me, Anne.

Anne Ganguzza (00:59.929)
I love this. So I had such a wonderful time meeting you like fleetingly at MAVO and was so excited to get the chance to talk to you and work with you as well. You're gonna be coming up soon as a guest director for me on my VO Peeps group. So I'm very excited about that. And so for bosses that don't know who you are, give us a brief, kind of a brief.

Luanne Regis (01:06.115)
Yes.

Luanne Regis (01:16.777)
I can't wait.

Anne Ganguzza (01:26.981)
bio of you more than what I've given in regards to your evolution through the years as a talent agent and representative.

Luanne Regis (01:37.067)
Sure, of course. So I'll try to be brief because it is quite a long speech. And you know, voiceover, just, people ask you, how do you get into voiceover? And I'm like, I sort of really just fell into it, which I did. You know, back in the mid nineties, I answered an ad, they were looking for a voiceover assistant, an agent, and one of the partners at a boutique agency was looking for an assistant. And I thought, this is great. Let me just try this. And I quickly liked it. I liked the fact that

Anne Ganguzza (01:41.124)
Ha ha ha ha!

Luanne Regis (02:04.703)
The voice can really be anything. It has nothing to do with your aesthetic, what you look like, how tall you are, what color your hair is. I loved that. That to me was a very creative aspect for VoiceOver. And I started there and quickly became an agent, a scale agent, and was there for about five years. I have seen the business really, really grow and change to...

And right around the early 2001s when all of the theatrical agencies were getting into voiceover because they poo-pooed and they snubbed their noses at voiceover for so very long, a major theatrical agency wanted to have a voiceover department. And so they plucked our entire department from the boutique agency, which was Special Artists, which is where I worked since the mid-90s. And we took our entire business, SpongeBob and all, and set up shop at Innovative Artists, which was the

Anne Ganguzza (02:56.229)
Mm-hmm.

Luanne Regis (02:58.751)
Bicoastal theatrical agency that I was at for 16 years, including what you mentioned in my bio, starting a Chicago voiceover department for them in 2007, just after the birth of my daughter. So I was there for 16 years and you wake up one day and you have 800 clients because you represent not only, we came with not only our voiceover department intact with all of our amazing clients, but we also were there to represent.

Anne Ganguzza (03:00.314)
Yes.

Luanne Regis (03:26.591)
their clients and they have a really healthy roster, a very well known TV and film actors. And that's where I began doing celebrity and overscale voiceover and really enjoyed it. But you know, like I said, you wake up one day and you have 800 clients and that's a lot to manage, especially in the way in which I agent. I was taught voiceover agenting by one of the best, she's a mentor, Marsha Hurwitz. you know, it's...

Anne Ganguzza (03:29.735)
Mm-hmm.