Interview with Debi Derryberry
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Debi Derryberry
Voice actor known as Jimmy Neutron, Draculaura in Monster High and the Toy Story aliens. She teaches voice-over and wrote Voice-Over 101.
Source: Est. in the 90s on YouTube
These answers are taken from The Voice Behind Jimmy Neutron & More | Debi Derryberry Interview on Est. in the 90s's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with voice acting?
I had always been acting as a kid actor, on stage, just community theater. I auditioned for To Kill a Mockingbird in high school and I did that. Then in Nashville I auditioned for the repertory theater, and I got the role of Scout when I was 27, playing a 12-year-old. Somebody saw me in the show and they said, will you be in Hey Vern, It's Ernest? which was a kids TV show, like Pee-wee Herman's.
I never got paid to sing as a grown-up in Nashville. I did do a lot of jingles, but only as a kid's voice. I was more comfortable singing like a kid and talking like a kid.
What drew you to a career in voice over?
I'm a premed at UCLA. In my spare time, all I did was play guitar and write songs and make people listen to me sing. My family was so tired of it. Then I graduated, and I didn't want to go to med school, and a boyfriend at the time said, you should just move to Nashville. So I quit my little job at some real estate company, moved to Nashville and waited tables. I wanted to be a country artist so bad. I went every day to the Ralph Emery Show, and I would show up at 5 a.m. with my cassette: this is my demo, can I sing on your show? And every day it was, no, honey. Well, one day a country artist named Lorrie Morgan didn't show up. It was the day before Christmas Eve and it was snowing, and they came out and said, Debi, do you want to sing on the show today?
The sax player liked me and gave me the name of an agent, and she got me in commercials, and she said, do you want to be a stand-in for these boys in Ernest Goes to Camp? Scotty Menville was in that movie when he was 10 or 12, and his mom said, why don't you try voice-over cartoons? I'm like, what is that?
What was a great moment for you as a voice actor?
I did the show called Monster High as the voice of Draculaura, who's a 1,600-year-old vampire. People love her, especially people who didn't feel at home. Monster High was a great cartoon that brought people in who felt different and let them know they were okay and there was a place for them. So when I have Draculaura Monster High fans come to my table, and this happens about four to five times a day, I say, do you love Draculaura? And then I'll speak in Draculaura's voice to them. I kid you not, they will break down in tears. They will start shaking. Their lips start quivering. And I have to get up and give them a hug, because that's what you've got to do when someone's loving you that much. I thought maybe it was a once in a con thing, but it's happening all the time now, because it means so much to them. And it means so much to me.
How did your voice over career unfold?
Scotty's mom gave me three names, and I wrote to them and sent them my cassettes. Jenny McSwain, who worked at Marvel at the time, wrote back and said, great cassette, if you ever move back to LA, let me know. So I quickly got divorced and moved back to LA. Jenny walked me into ICM, and Jeff Danis signed me, and two weeks later I had my first job. It hasn't stopped in 35 years. So when people say, how do you get into voice-over? I'm like, it's easy. You just do what I did.
What was cool about that time in my career is that if I auditioned for anything that started with the letter J, I would book it. I had Jackie on Bobby's World, Jeannie on Life with Louie, Judy on Jumanji, Jake on Taz-Mania, JJ Jet Plane.
Then Jimmy Neutron. We did the little interstitials, and then they said, guess what, we're going to do a feature. Then they said, we're going to do a TV series, and then we got a second season. It became an iconic show.
What advice do you have for new voice actors?
You have to do what you love. You have to always pursue what's exciting for you.
I always tell my actors, because I teach a lot of voice-over: give the animators something to do. Don't just read the lines. You can throw in the vomits just for fun if it's not in the line. You use these little tips and tricks to make the line a little more fun for the animator.
Just like all the facets of voice-over, there are different skill sets: regular animation, anime, commercials, narration, promo, dubbing, looping. It's all kinds of things to learn for that specific thing. And knowing what you're good at. There are some people that are super great at commercials, and some people who are great at medical narration or promos, and that's their gig.
You do not want to look at us while we're performing. Just go for it, 1,000 percent. You've got to dive in, because if you don't commit, you will know.
I get asked so many questions, like what are your top two tricks, and that's just not a five minute answer. So I wrote everything I knew in the book.
How do you take direction and keep communication clear in a remote session?
It's sad, because we're all by ourselves. You have to imagine that there's feedback, which in the '90s there was. You'd go into the booth and you'd do something, and you'd see them smile or laugh. Now you hear it, and you see no one.
Now sometimes we have to edit jobs. With your audition, you have to think who you're competing against. You edit it really well, there's no pauses, and the acting's good, so you want to give the casting director really competitive auditions. So it's tough to get into voice-over now, because there are so many more hats you have to wear. People are kind of afraid of learning it all, and I certainly was. But people have been very patient with me, and I can do it now. I can multitrack, even. You get these Disney auditions with a song and a karaoke track, you record it, mix it together, edit it and send it in.
Directing trained voice actors is easier, because we know what it means when they say smooth that out, tighten it up, take out the spaces. We know what they're talking about.
Describe your voice and your style.
For any adult that can really sound like a child, you have to just be able to get into that mentality and inhabit it. It's sort of like remembering what it was like to speak that way. I study little kids. I listen to how they talk. I mimic them. If people have infants, I put them on my chest, and they think I'm playing with them. Really, I'm studying them. Most 10-year-old boys sound like women. So women can sound like 10-year-old boys, as long as you can dial back the age, the mentality of your cadence and your speech and the rhythms. They pause a bit more. They breathe in weird spots. They're not so skilled in their pronunciation.
And that's the interesting thing about voice-over: we take these things that we can do and we layer them. On F is for Family there's Bridget, who's 10 years old with braces, and another character who's my really dumb dog's voice, only he's seven years old and he has a cold and a southern accent. You just put these little things on top of any voice to create different characters.
Tell me about a read or a character that was hard to get right. What was the job and why was it challenging?
Jimmy Neutron. When I went in and saw all those people on the sign-in sheet, I thought, all those people really do play boys really well, because they've got texture, or gravel, as we call it in voice-over. It's that thing that sounds like a little boy, which I can't really do for more than a second. You have to pick a voice that you can sustain for 4 hours, because that's how long the sessions are. So I thought, if I want to stand a chance at this job, I have to do my version of a little boy, which has zero texture. And lo and behold, they picked me.
Anime is hard in a different way. The animation's done, so you are married to the lip flaps. Back when I did Zatch Bell, it was take after take until it matched. You wait for the rhythm band that goes across the screen, and when it lines up with a little line, that's when you start talking. You have to memorize it real quick, match those mouth flaps, start right when the band hits the line, and match the note the director just gave you. And you can't move around, because the mic's right there. You're processing all this stuff at once.
What is the biggest audience your voice has reached?
I am the voice of the aliens in Toy Story, and you can hear me saying, the claw. However, it was a loop job. After the principals are recorded, they bring in a group of about 13 of us, and they say, in this scene we're at Pizza Planet, here's the gumball machine filled with all these aliens. We run up to the microphone, and on the fourth beep you talk. When you loop a film, you never know if you're going to get cut or not. So when we watched the movie, I'm like, I made it. That's me.
Anytime you go to Disneyland, the little aliens are everywhere. And when Buzz is hiding at Pizza Planet, you can still hear the loudspeaker going, party of six, your pizza's ready. Well, that's me. So Disney called me in the middle of COVID and said, we want you to come in and do the voice of the Pizza Planet ride. I'm like, how did you know that was me? They just knew that was my voice. Wow, a gift, 22 years later. When you're on the ride, it's, please keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your demo list.
I would never take the job again, because I don't believe in whales in captivity, but we're talking a long time ago. They were looking for someone to body double the 12-year-old boy in Free Willy, a scuba diver who was 12-year-old size. I had already played a 12-year-old on Hey Vern, It's Ernest and body doubled boys in Ernest Goes to Camp. So they flew me to Mexico City two days later, where I spent seven weeks training with Keiko the killer whale.
In the scene, the boy trips at night, hits his head, falls in and sinks to the bottom of the 18-foot tank, and the whale comes and lifts him up. So my job was to let the whale rescue me. At 10 at night I was 18 feet under, in the dark, and I hadn't had LASIK yet, so I was legally blind. I could feel him about 20 feet from me, because it's several tons of an animal. Then I saw this large black shadow, and Keiko stuck his nose under me and I just froze. Don't kick your legs. Don't move. Wait till you're at the top and the whale pushes you over. I knew Keiko by then. He trusted me. He liked me.
Debi Derryberry's Full Biography
Debi Derryberry, is best known for voicing Jimmy Neutron in the Academy Award-nominated film Jimmy Neutron-Boy Genius. She also stars in Adult Swim's Tigtone as the voice of Helpy. In Netflix's Emmy Nominated F is For Family Debi voices Maureen, Philip, Bridget, Scott, Beatrice the Nurse and Kenny. Other voice-over work includes Draculaura in Monster High and work in Toy Story, Curious George and Crash Bandicoot.
Her TikTok page has over 1.1 Million Followers and 22.1 Million likes!
Raised in Indio, CA, she graduated UCLA as a pre-med student. After 3 years in Nashville as a country music singer/writer, she returned to Los Angeles to launch her voice-over career. Debi has written and recorded 3 award-winning pre-school music albums. Her song "Baby Banana" hit #1 on Sirius/XM Kid.
Voted LA's #1 Voice-over coach by Backstage West, Debi has also written the popular "Voice-Over 101: How to Succeed as a Voice Actor."
After almost 30 years and nearly 300 Imdb credits, Debi is one of Hollywood's most active and sought-after voice-over artists.