Interview with Daniel Marin
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Daniel Marin
Costa Rican-born actor who voices Namor in Marvel Rivals and Gus in Call of Duty, with on-camera roles in The Chosen, SWAT and NCIS: Los Angeles.
These answers are taken from Daniel Marin | Full Episode | Toon'd In! with Jim Cummings on Toon'd In with Jim Cummings's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with voice acting?
I never even thought it was a possibility for me. I thought I'm going to be on TV and do movies. I think honestly the reason that I got into it to begin with is because I speak Spanish. The assistant in my commercial on-camera agency moved to the voice department, and he messaged me. He goes, "Hey, I submitted you for an audition. Can you record it?" I was like, "I've never done this." "So just come to the office after hours. We'll record it. I'll help you." Boom. We did it, and the next day they booked me, and it was to be the voice of a fast food chain, one of the big ones. It was Burger King, and I did that for 11 years.
I had to pretend I knew what I was doing and learn on the spot. And then that led to the next job. So it was like, oh, wow, I can do this.
What was a great moment for you as a voice actor?
During the pandemic I was playing a lot of Call of Duty, and I got an audition. They're all under codes, so we don't know what it is, but I knew it was for Call of Duty because I was playing it religiously. And I thought, I could either record what I hear in the game, or I can give them my version of what if this guy is really good at what he does, but he also has a sense of humor. It was a Brazilian character, and I grew up in Brazil and I speak Portuguese, so I threw in some Portuguese stuff.
When I booked it, I was shooting an on-camera TV show in Texas. I was in a hotel, and at 11 at night my agent tells me, "Hey, you got Call of Duty." And I screamed so loud that the receptionist was knocking on my door. When I got there, they're like, "Daniel, we know you're not Brazilian. You're from Costa Rica. We want you to make him Costa Rican, and say Costa Rican phrases and Costa Rican slang." That to me was such an incredible gift, to be able to put my country in a franchise. He has a Costa Rican flag on his shoulder.
How did your voice over career unfold?
I had done a tiny little part in a DLC for a game called Just Cause 4. The director was Michael, who directs us on Rivals. During the session I was like, this is my very first video game. What can I do to get more of these? And he gave me some advice. He talked about the first 3 to 10 seconds: if we don't hear something that catches our attention, we're going to move on, because we have 400 auditions. We really want to hear your personality come through. And I took it to heart. Then I booked Call of Duty.
The next audition I got for a video game was for Marvel, but it's under a code, so we don't know what it is. And I forgot to send that audition in. After the deadline, the assistant at my agency messaged me, "Are you going to send this in?" I ran into my closet, and I'm like, okay, who's the most regal character I can think of? Mufasa. So Namor is a stolen Mufasa, with a little bit of a Hispanic accent. It wasn't until seven months after I auditioned that I was at the Long Beach Aquarium with my son, literally petting a stingray, and my phone's ringing: "You're going to be Namor in Marvel."
What advice do you have for new voice actors?
People ask me for one piece of advice. I always say, if they're holding auditions, I don't think they know what they're looking for yet. So you might be the answer. So don't try to give them what you think they want. Give them what you can bring. If you have to sustain this for 10 years on a show and you can't, because you did something you couldn't really hold in the audition, that's a hard one. So just be you. Be something that you can sustain and go from there.
I didn't prepare to be a voice actor. I prepared to be an actor. And I think that's what leads into these other things.
Has your voice over career progressed the way you expected?
People ask me, "How do I become a voice actor?" I'm like, "I have no clue. I'm winging it as I go through this." When I came to LA, I was like, I'm a real actor. I'm not doing stuff in Spanish. Commercials? No way. And now I make a living that way, making commercials in Spanish. So when they call me in to do the voice again, I'm like, I hope I get it right this time and I don't get fired.
It's extremely intimidating. I have imposter syndrome a lot of the time, like I sort of fell into a hole that I didn't belong in. I'll be at parties and see people and I'm like, "Oh my god." Thankfully, I didn't know a lot about voice actors before this game put me in that sort of stratosphere, so I don't get as intimidated when I meet some. But it's also amazing that I have this opportunity. I just feel like I've gotten right-timing luck, and tons of preparation.
How do you take direction and keep communication clear in a remote session?
[On Call of Duty] it was all remote. I was at Warner Brothers, but the directors were remote. And they were like, "How do you like to kill someone?" And I was like, "I love to hit him with a sticky grenade." And they're like, "What do you say?" I'm like, "Oh, throw it, sticky." And we all laughed. The engineer's like, "Yeah, I was rolling on that. Do you want to play that back?" And now it's in the game. That's insane to me.
Describe your voice and your style.
To me, Namor's voice comes from: why is he speaking the way he is? He's a regal man with a huge cavity in his chest, because he commands armies under the ocean, and he thinks everybody is beneath him. He thinks humans are just air breathers. So that point of view creates that character, and that's how I created that voice. It wasn't like, oh, I can do a cool deep voice, let's do it that way.
Gus is very much between me and Namor. I think that's my wheelhouse. And the difference with Namor is that in English you speak back here, but in Spanish it's in the front of your mouth.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your demo list.
I truly always wanted to be a soccer player. When I moved to Brazil, I was 13, and there were tryouts for the under-17s. There were 300 kids trying out, and it was me and three people left. At the tryout the coaches called me over: "Daniel, how old are you?" I said, "13." They're like, "You're 16? Excellent. Here's your contract." I was already 6'2" at that point. I played for about eight months, and then I got really injured pretty badly, and I couldn't continue playing professional soccer.
My mom used to work for the UN. She was the director for UNESCO, so we moved to different countries all the time. Every time we moved to a new country, in order for me to acclimate, they would put me in classes, guitar or art or cooking or whatever it was. And acting was always something that I really gravitated toward.
Daniel Marin's Full Biography
Daniel Marin is a versatile actor, having found success both as a voice actor and also on camera, with Guest appearances on shows like The Chosen, SWAT, NCIS Los Angeles, the Bold and the Beautiful, among others and having starred in films like Costa Rica's selection for the Oscars "Imprisoned" and the multi award winning film "El Primo (The Cousin). Born in San José, Costa Rica, he traveled extensively throughout Central and South America, as well as Central Asia, during his youth, becoming fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Elon University in North Carolina and resides in Los Angeles, California.
In addition to his on-screen work, he has lent his voice to notable characters such as Namor in "Marvel Rivals" and Gustavo "Gus" RodrÃguez in "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" and "Modern Warfare 3." Beyond acting, Marin is an accomplished magician, performing globally in multiple languages, and has worked as a professional photographer for the United Nations. He also played professional soccer as a teen in Brazil.