Interview with Scott Brick
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Scott Brick
Audiobook narrator, actor and screenwriter from Santa Barbara, California. He has narrated over 1,000 audiobooks, including the Dune series, Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton and the Brad Meltzer thrillers.
These answers are taken from Being A Narrator | Scott Brick [INTERVIEW] on The Home Audio Project's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with voice acting?
The way I became an audiobook narrator, I don't know if it's duplicatable. I went to college with a buddy of mine. His name's Bob Westall, blessed be his name. The man will never get to pay for a drink anywhere near me for the rest of his life. He was working for an audiobook company, and he had been to a number of performances that I had done at UCLA and elsewhere, and he got me my first audition, my first book. It was a couple of short stories. My first day in the booth was the last day of somebody else at that company, Dan Musselman. He went on to found the LA studios for a company called Books on Tape, which then got bought out by Random House.
Back in those days, we didn't have to do websites, we didn't have to do demos. I just went in and I read for somebody and they hired me. I am so grateful that I was able to break in then.
What drew you to a career in voice over?
My first inspiration to get into audiobooks was old time radio, because I'm a massive fan of The Jack Benny Program, Inner Sanctum, The Shadow, Suspense, all these great shows from the '30s, '40s and '50s. I love the oral storytelling tradition. Jack Benny's been gone for almost 50 years. He died in 1974. But I've got over 800 of his radio shows, and it's as though he's reading to me right now. And I loved the idea that at some point in my life, after my life, there would be this body of work. That's what inspired me to get into the industry.
What do you enjoy most about voice over?
I remember in vivid detail what it was like working on Alexander Hamilton, the basis for the stage phenomenon. As I was reading this, I realized that I don't think I've ever learned more from a book than I did from that one. The conversations we had at the lunch table outside, the other narrators who were there working on different books, they would try to coordinate their lunches with us. They were like, "Tell us more about Alexander Hamilton founding the Coast Guard." Every day I walked into the studio, I just reveled in how much I was learning, because when you do that, I think you're able to channel the author's enthusiasm for the subject.
How many times have you been in a bar, at a party, loud places, and you'll be talking to somebody and you'll say, "Oh my gosh, you don't know this," and even though it's loud everywhere, you get quieter? Essentially what you say is always the same: you don't know this, but if you let me tell you this story, your life will be better. When it comes to nonfiction, it's the author's enthusiasm that you have to channel.
What was a great moment for you as a voice actor?
Ten, 15 years after I recorded The First Counsel, I'm doing an event with Brad Meltzer. I'm in the audience, he's up on stage, and they said, "Brad, when did you realize that you had a good partner in Scott Brick?" And he said, "I've got to be honest. It was at the opening of The First Counsel." He said he had written two novels previously, read by two different narrators, neither of which he felt a connection with. But he heard this long run-on sentence that he had given me to record, and he realized, "Oh, he gets me."
Ten years later, when the contract expired on books one and two, Brad told his publisher, "Get Scott to re-record books one and two." I've now done every single thriller that Brad has ever written. That never would have happened if I didn't have the courage to stand up and say, this isn't right.
What advice do you have for new voice actors?
The number one thing I would tell myself, if I could go back, is to realize that this storytelling medium is different. Therefore it has some limitations that I wouldn't face if I were on stage or on camera, but it also has possibilities that stage and camera acting don't have. At the very beginning of silent film, it was all projected. They were hiring stage actors, the old storytelling medium, to perform in the new storytelling medium, who didn't realize, I don't need to reach a hundred feet to the back of the house, I could just reach six feet away from me where the camera is. There's always a learning gap between what you were used to in the old medium versus what is available to you here. I don't need to shout anything to the back of the house. I can instead say, hey, listen to me, I'm right here, and I sound like I'm talking right in your ear, because I am.
There's a wonderful line in A Christmas Carol where Dickens as the narrator says he is standing in the spirit at your elbow. It's a moment of direct address from the author to the audience. When I did A Christmas Carol, that's how I read the line, because I suddenly understood we have that opportunity in audiobooks in a way that doesn't exist in film, TV or stage acting.
What has been your greatest accomplishment as a voice actor?
I started working on the Dune series in 2001, and the authors have become very dear friends of mine, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. They have been really great stewards of the Dune universe. They've curated the Dune universe, I think, is a good word for it. There are very few things that make me prouder than my association with it. I've got an audio glossary of all of the made-up words, names and phrases in the Dune universe. It's over 1,900 words long now. It's in an Excel spreadsheet on my computer, and I shared it with Brian Herbert, and he said to me, "I just want you to know that you've become a pillar of the Dune universe." And I told him, in all honesty, I feel like I just got dubbed with a sword. I'm hugely proud of that.
Think about a demanding director, producer or client in a session. What made them difficult, and how did you work with them successfully?
It was the year 2000, and I had been flown to New York by Hachette to do a book by Brad Meltzer called The First Counsel. We were using this new method called the punch and roll. I was so overwhelmed by the technical side of things that I found it very difficult to connect to the truth. The very first page was one long run-on sentence: I'm afraid of spiders, I'm afraid of clowns, I'm afraid of disappointing my father, and at the very end it said, but I'm not afraid of power, which is why I work in the White House. I knew this opening page was special, but I was so overwhelmed, going, am I making too much noise, are they going to stop me? And it was stilted.
When I finished that book and finally felt like I had understood Brad, I said, "I need to redo those opening couple of pages." And they're like, "No, you don't. You were fine." I'm like, well, fine isn't right. Good enough isn't. I didn't understand Brad until I was well into the book. I had to talk them into it. The guy directing it sighed really loudly and said, "Fine, go ahead." And I did it.
How do you take direction and keep communication clear in a remote session?
I can't stand the punch and roll, which is why I use the tally clicker. It's like that game Othello: an hour to learn, a lifetime to master. I embrace the breath, the intake of breath right before you say a line, because it's natural. Barbra Streisand will never edit out a breath in one of her recordings.
I know that punch and roll is an industry standard. So I charge more when a publisher approaches me. If the union minimum is, let's say, 225 or 250, I'll say, okay, I need an extra 30 or 40 per finished hour, because I need to hire somebody to edit all of these out. That helps me do my best work. And there's times where there's no money in the budget, and so I'll be here in my booth until midnight editing out my own tally click marks. That's fine. I'm still doing my best work.
Any engineer, any director, is going to be looking at the words. Is the text correct? Because that's job one. But you can get every word right, all in the right order, all pronounced correctly, and it doesn't mean that it's right. I respect and admire engineers and editors so much, but I know what I'm good at, and sometimes I just have to say, no, I really need to redo this.
Of all the voices and characters you have recorded, which is your favorite?
I'm hugely proud of the work that I've done on Nelson DeMille's titles. He was my very first bestseller ever, one of the John Corey novels, and every single time one of them comes along, I'm like, I can't believe they're paying me to do this work. The Orphan X saga by Gregg Hurwitz means the world to me. Those are really unique thrillers, because they show the humanity of the person who's pulling the trigger and doing the job. Brad Meltzer's work floors me. We just did the most recent one, The Lightning Rod. All of those authors find a way to bring humanity to the person who is pulling the trigger or solving the mystery, in a way that I find unique and thrilling. I would probably do those jobs for free, but please don't tell the publishers, because I'd like to get paid.
Describe your voice and your style.
Pat Fraley and I have always said that you have to wed tricks with truth. Tricks is our sarcastic term for technique: physical changes that you can make to your voice. There are eight ways of creating emphasis in human speech. Most of us tend to land on volume. We see an exclamation mark and go, oh, I must yell. That's only one of eight. You can go high or low in volume, you can speak faster or slower, you can pause before the word or after the word, and then there's pitch, rising higher and going lower. Truth is the emotional truth of the scene, whatever is going on emotionally for the character. You have to take those techniques and wed them to an emotional truth, otherwise it is an empty experience.
Narrators see pronouns and we tend to land on them. We call that going into pronoun hell. Any time you overstress a pronoun, the listener is going to think, as opposed to who else? We also tend to stress repetition. Authors repeat things all of the time for emphasis, but when we see the repeated word or phrase as narrators, we tend to land on them. You can't. We should probably stress the modifier, and it's only when we can embrace the nuance of it all that we can really fulfill the author's intent.
Tell me about a read or a character that was hard to get right. What was the job and why was it challenging?
Years ago I was working on a book about a detective investigating what seemed an obvious case of suicide, but he made time for the victim's ex-wife, who said, you don't understand, he would never commit suicide. The line was, "So why do you think this is murder?" I've played a lot of cops, and as I'm doing it, I emphasized the "you." I got about five, six sentences later and I went, no, I can't do that, and I had to go back and fix it. When you stress the word "you," you're implying that everybody else thinks it's murder too. Whereas really it needed to be, what makes you think this was murder, because everybody else thinks it's suicide. Stressing that one word changes the meaning of the sentence for the listener.
The important thing, especially for new narrators, is to realize that it is an interactive experience. Just because my work in the booth is done doesn't mean that the book's work is done. Every consumer of that story is going to be interpreting that story, and it's my job to not get in the way of that.
Scott Brick's Full Biography
Actor, screenwriter and audiobook narrator Scott Brick definitely gives new meaning to a hyphenate career with credits in film, television, stage and radio. Born on January 30, 1966 in Santa Barbara, California, Brick studied both acting and writing at UCLA, and joined the ranks of working professionals upon leaving school in 1989. He then spent ten years with the LA-based Will and Company, a traveling Shakespearean company which performed for schools throughout California, in addition to acting in such roles as Cyrano, Hamlet and Macbeth at various playhouses around the country. Brick went on to become a freelance writer and published articles in magazines such as Wizard, Creative Screenwriting and ToyFare. In 2000, he was hired by Morgan Freeman and Revelations Entertainment to adapt Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama for the big screen. Also in 2000, Brick ventured into narrating audiobooks and quickly found himself embraced by the audio world. To date he's won over 30 Earphones Awards for his narrating skills, as well as the 2003 Audie Award for Dune: The Butlerian Jihad. After recording some 250 titles in five years, AudioFile Magazine named Brick "one of the fastest-rising stars in the audiobook galaxy," and proclaimed him a Golden Voice. But it was the Wall Street Journal that sealed the moniker with a front page piece in November 2004. Most recently, he collaborated with famed sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card to adapt a collection of Card's short stories for the stage, which resulted in the play, Posing as People as well as completed the production draft of Rama, set to be directed by David Fincher. Brick is currently writing his first novel, a modern-day supernatural thriller based on an 18th century murder in New England. No word on whether any celebrities will be asked to record the audiobook.