Interview with Cherami Leigh
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Cherami Leigh
American voice and screen actress from Texas who began acting at six. She voices Asuna in Sword Art Online, Lucy in Fairy Tail and Sailor Venus in Sailor Moon.
Source: AfterBuzz TV on YouTube
These answers are taken from Cherami Leigh Interview | AfterBuzz TV's Spotlight On on AfterBuzz TV's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What drew you to a career in voice over?
I really wanted to be on Barney. That was my ultimate goal, wanting to be an actor so that one day I could sing and dance with the purple dinosaur. That never occurred, but my path has taken a different direction. I don't know, maybe I could be the voice of a dinosaur hanging out with Barney, who knows. That was a big deal in Dallas.
I only started doing theater when I was like 12, because they didn't have film or voiceover in middle school and high school. We barely had theater. So I got into doing theater that way, and did theater stuff in college, and did my first musical in college.
What do you enjoy most about voice over?
Now that I've gotten to experience a little bit of everything, improv troupes and stage shows and voiceover work, if I didn't get to do a little bit of everything all the time I would really miss something and feel off balance. When I was in Pittsburgh working on a film, I was there every day for a month, and it was fantastic, but I remember thinking, man, can I just get into the booth and do some VO work, just 15 minutes? I really miss it.
I've worked in live radio. I was a DJ for a while, so I'm probably more comfortable and at home in a booth than I am on set, because every set is different. It's kind of like going to a new school every day.
Going to the conventions is fantastic. When we record, we're there with two computer screens, locked in a padded room. We don't know what people think unless we look online. So it's so fun getting to see people that love the shows and hear what they think. The fans are so supportive and loving that it far exceeds any amount of exhaustion.
What was a great moment for you as a voice actor?
I will be working on Sailor Moon. That was actually my first introduction to the world of anime. Until I started working in anime, I thought all anime was Sailor Moon, Pokémon and Dragon Ball. So to get to be working on Sailor Moon in any capacity, I would have been girl with hair bow in the background and would have been absolutely ecstatic.
But I'm playing Sailor Venus, which I think is going to be another one of those roles where I'm like, this is totally me. She's a girly girl, but she's silly, and she's sassy, and she's not afraid to put some people in their place when needed. I love how well-rounded and multifaceted Sailor Venus is as a character. You just can't peg her down to one thing, which is really fun.
Think about a demanding director, producer or client in a session. What made them difficult, and how did you work with them successfully?
I haven't had a bad director so far. I've been very fortunate. Every director has a different way of working. When I worked with Richard Linklater, he would tell one actor a secret, like, this is what I want you to do, and then tell the other actor something else. An actor friend of mine was told, she's your girlfriend, you need to hug her and try to kiss her before you leave. And I was told, you're done with this guy, don't let him touch you. So the whole scene he keeps trying to touch me, and it's not written in. It made for a really awkward scene, but when directors do stuff like that to surprise the actors and keep us on our toes, it makes for some really interesting moments.
As an actor you can learn different things and grow in different ways, as long as you're willing to come to work that day and play with whatever happens. A lot of actors will say, this other director doesn't really do it the same way. Well, try it differently, see what happens. It's still work, it's still fun, it's still a gift to get to go be an actor that day.
Of all the voices and characters you have recorded, which is your favorite?
It's impossible to pick a favorite. It's like picking children. I've played Lucy on Fairy Tail for so long. In the beginning I didn't audition for that character. I auditioned for Erza and Happy, and I really liked the show, and the director said, get back in there and read for Lucy. I was like, don't do this to me, I love this show. Now that we've done so many episodes, I definitely relate to her, and it's so easy to jump back into her.
I really enjoyed playing Gaige in Borderlands too. I've never been a mad scientist girl. I'm actually not that great at science. But she likes to have fun and be crazy. Anthony, who created that universe, said improvise as much as you can, fill in the blanks, this is a skeleton.
In Soul Eater, when I played Patty, she was completely uninhibited. It was really freeing to get to play a character that honestly didn't care what people thought, and to get out of my high school, super insecure self. If she can do that, then why am I only able to be uninhibited behind the guise of her?
Describe your voice and your style.
I feel like there's an aspect of me in every character that I've played, because otherwise I don't think that I would be able to find an authentic self in the character. If I can't find a common thread, I probably won't get cast as the character, because it's not going to come across as an honest portrayal.
Most of the time when I'm doing a film or a show, I'm researching the human condition. I played a character that was very suicidal and was a drug addict, and I've never been addicted to any sort of substance, so I need to talk to somebody and figure out what that's like. I always say as an actor you have to be empathetic, and you have to be willing to step into someone else's head space without judging them. You have to love them for where they are. Nobody wakes up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and decides to destroy people's lives. Finding that rabbit trail of what got them to the places that they're in is really fun for me, and it makes for a better performance, because it's more well-rounded. It's not just a two-dimensional character.
Tell me about a read or a character that was hard to get right. What was the job and why was it challenging?
I had grown up always being the cute girl or the little sister, so when I get cast in characters that are more sexy and more seductive, the crazy Jessica Rabbit kind of villain characters, that is terrifying to me. I hate it, and I am the most immature person ever in the booth, because I'm like, if I make enough jokes then they totally won't make this awkward. But in anime, of course, there's fan service, so sometimes those moments have to happen, and you're just like, I'm in a box, there's a window, people are staring at me. I'm a panda at the zoo. This is so uncomfortable.
But I've had a lot of directors that are like, you can do this. And I know that if a director believes in me enough to say, you can do this, you are limiting yourself and we're not going to let you do it, then I'm like, this director is investing so much in me and they really believe in me. I can't let them down. I'm going to do the best that I can. I'm going to suck it up.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your demo list.
Brina Palencia's brother Gino has a mannequin named Manny. He's dressed up with this awful Hannibal Lecter mask, and he's covered in blood. Somebody thought it would be a fantastic idea to put it in a booth and scare one of the actors, and everybody agreed that I would be the easiest target. So they put it in the booth, and the director, Chris Cason, was like, Cherami, there's something behind you. I turned around and it startled me, because it is like a man in the corner, and I just said, do you want a hug? I love you. And I went to hug the mannequin that's covered in blood.
They got really upset with me. People came in like, so what did she do? Did she scream? They said, she went to hug it. Later I went home and talked to my mom, and my grandmother mentioned that when I was a baby, she put on a wolf mask in a grocery store around Halloween, and I started crying and said, I love you, do you want a hug? So if there was a zombie apocalypse, I'd probably be like, you know what, I'm going to go hug everybody.
What are some of your professional goals for the future?
There are a couple. I haven't gotten to do any motion capture video games, so that would be amazing and really fun. And I would love to be able to write my own film or my own series and get to shoot that in either Italy or England. Something similar to National Treasure or The Da Vinci Code, where there's a lot of art history and a lot of research, things being uncovered. If we could take aspects from the Renaissance and delve into it and find hidden things that might have occurred that maybe people don't know about, that would be one of the coolest things ever. And running from the government, or whoever the bad guys would be.
I'm an art history nerd. I had a picture of the Mona Lisa as my screen saver on my phone for about four years. I want to find the history or the moment or all the things that happened behind that.
Cherami Leigh's Full Biography
Cherami Leigh Kuehn (born July 19, 1988) is an American actress and voice artist who has provided voices for a number of English-language versions of Japanese anime series and video games with Funimation, Bang Zoom! Entertainment and Studiopolis.
Leigh began acting at the age of six. She studied Meisner-based Film Acting Technique with Nancy Chartier from the age of nine. As a child she played Gretchen in Finding North, Marcia in Temple Grandin, the young LeAnn Rimes in Holiday in Your Heart (1997), Stacy Anderson in The President's Man (2000), and appeared on the television series Walker, Texas Ranger (1993) multiple times. On screen, she played Kim in Fast Food Nation (2006). In 2014, she had the lead role in Shane Dawson's Not Cool (2014). As a voice artist, her roles have included Sae Kashiwagi in Peach Girl, Cecily Campbell in The Sacred Blacksmith, Tamaki Kawazoe in Bamboo Blade, Lucy Heartfilia in Fairy Tail, Patty Thompson in Soul Eater, and Asuna Yuuki in Sword Art Online.
Leigh attended Hebron High School in Carrollton, Texas and studied theater at Collin College in Plano. She worked for Radio Disney as a DJ and also voice-over promotions and commercials for ABC Radio for 10 years. In 2013 she moved to Los Angeles, and continued voice acting on video games and anime as well as take on live-action acting roles. She married fellow actor Jon Christie on April 13, 2014, whom she had dated since 2010.