“We all want to be like Bugs, but we’re all really Daffy,” said the voice actor Eric Bauza with a hearty laugh during a recent interview in Los Angeles.
For the past five years, the Canadian performer, 45, has played both the clever rabbit and the hyperactive duck. He has won two Children’s & Family Emmy Awards for voicing these pair, as well as other characters, in the series “Looney Tunes Cartoons” and “Bugs Bunny Builders.”
Over the years he’s also summoned Sylvester, Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn and Elmer Fudd.
In the director Peter Browngardt’s “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie” (in theaters March 14), Bauza voices both Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. Distributed by Ketchup Entertainment, the first fully-animated original feature starring these characters to get a theatrical release is a zany, hand drawn, sci-fi romp in which buddies Daffy and Porky must defeat a malicious alien invader.
Sitting in a meeting room at the Garland Hotel in North Hollywood, and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Wilma Flintstone (Hanna-Barbera’s “The Flintstones” is among his favorite classic cartoons), Bauza recalled first watching “Looney Tunes” on Saturday mornings growing up in Scarborough, Ontario. The wacky violence and daring humor of those cartoons enticed a young Bauza.
As he recounted one of his favorite “Looney Tunes” shorts, “Long-Haired Hare,” in which Bugs Bunny torments an opera singer, Bauza seamlessly shifted into singing in the voice of the famed animated wise guy, “Music hater and a rabbit hater too, apparently,” he recited.
“They really shaped my sense of humor as well as my love for drawing,” Bauza said about “Looney Tunes” while quickly sketching the face of Bugs Bunny, his favorite from the gang, on a notepad. “He had six whiskers if the cartoon is high budget, four whiskers if it’s low budget,” he said after completing the sketch.
Bauza has a deep knowledge both of Looney Tunes character history and the man who conceived most of their voices nearly 90 years ago: Mel Blanc.
“Mel Blanc is like the voice of God for me,” Bauza said. “He’s the blueprint. If you’re replicating any of these classic characters, you have to refer back to him because he created not just their voices but their personalities.”
Watching the special features on the “Looney Tunes” DVD box sets, which included Blanc’s recording sessions and notes, was a key resource for Bauza as he studied the voices.
The child of Filipino immigrants, Bauza has been doing funny voices to make people laugh for as long as he can remember.
He thinks of the time a teacher in high school tasked him with delivering the morning announcements over the P.A. system, as a catalyst for his interest in voice acting. Bauza would relay the information in different cartoon voices, which his classmates found amusing.
Yet, voice acting wasn’t always Bauza’s main aspiration. He first pursued a career as an animation artist. Following an internship at Spumco, the studio behind “The Ren & Stimpy Show,” he worked for the Los Angeles-based animation outfit Six Point Harness.
He soon realized, however, that he wasn’t finding creative fulfillment in those jobs and decided to focus full time on pursuing voice work. Being cast in the Nickelodeon show “El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera” secured him a visa to stay in the United States, along with membership into the Screen Actors Guild.
It was during the breaks in the recording sessions of the Cartoon Network show “Uncle Grandpa” that its creator, Browngardt, first heard Bauza impressively do the Looney Tunes voices.
When Browngardt was planning to direct the series “Looney Tunes Cartoons” for HBO Max in 2018, he immediately asked Bauza to audition. Committed to the part, Bauza brought carrots into the booth and ate them as he read for the role of Bugs Bunny.
“Bauza’s auditions stood out because it wasn’t just a straight impersonation of the voices Mel Blanc created,” Browngardt said. “He was able to act within the voices in such a way where it was very funny and very entertaining just like Mel Blanc did it.”
The animation historian Jerry Beck, who created the website Cartoon Research, agreed. “Eric embodies Mel at his prime, which is the 1940s when he was screaming and acting the lines in wilder and crazier ways,” Beck said. “Eric’s nailed that 1940s feeling.” Beck also said that he thought Bauza’s stint working as an animation artist empowered him with a unique advantage over other voice artists, because he understood the process.
For the movie, Bauza recorded all of Porky’s lines first, since Daffy was more strenuous on his vocal cords. But what truly impressed Browngardt was how precise Bauza was keeping track of how his two performances would eventually cut together.
“He imagined the scene in his head while performing as these characters that are so well known and he made it all really believable,” Browngardt said.
The performer’s first official job in this cartoon universe was voicing Marvin the Martian on “The Looney Tunes Show,” which aired on Cartoon Network from 2011-13. “Oh, isn’t that lovely, Earth creature?’ he said as the extraterrestrial.
On the “Looney Tunes Cartoons” series and in the 2021 film “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” Bauza flaunted his repertoire, voicing at least half a dozen characters in each project.
Beyond “Looney Tunes,” Bauza is also the voice match for the character Puss in Boots, voiced famously by Antonio Banderas. When the Spanish actor is unavailable to play the valiant feline (like for select TV ads), Bauza takes over.
He and other voice actors have found an additional source of income: stepping in for A-list talent when schedules conflict or when an actor is dismissed from a project. Bauza has voice-matched Bill Hader on “Bob’s Burgers” and Ezra Miller on “Invincible.”
Bauza believes his career has been built from a series of generous acts by the people in his life. From his late uncle who moved from Toronto to Los Angeles, and with whom he lived during his first internship in 1999, to all the artists who’ve entrusted him with bringing their characters to life.
Over the course of our conversation the vocally chameleonic Bauza channeled the voice of Homer and Marge Simpson, Peter Griffin from “Family Guy,” the actor Seth Rogen and even President Trump. “These Canadians, they’re coming over the border taking all the American voice jobs, we got to get them back to Canada,” he said in Trump’s distinct tone while smiling.
Still, Bauza hopes to one day be best known for a voice all his own.
“In this business the dream is to create an iconic voice that every kid in the schoolyard does,” Bauza said. “I’ve had some original characters that were well known, but none that when you do it everyone in the room lights up like you are putting on a superhero cape.”
