Interview with Tara Strong
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Tara Strong
Canadian-born voice actor known as Timmy Turner, Bubbles, Raven, Harley Quinn, Twilight Sparkle and Miss Minutes in Loki.
Source: I Hear Voices Podcast on YouTube
These answers are taken from Voice of Timmy Turner + Bubbles + Raven + Miss Minutes | Episode 13 on I Hear Voices Podcast's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with voice acting?
I knew when I was four or five I was here to be a performer. It's like you see people that can sit down and play Mozart without hearing it first, or can paint some beautiful thing. That's what they came here to do. That's what we came here to do. I didn't know that it was going to be primarily voiceover. I just knew that I wanted to sing, dance, act at a very young age.
I really had to beg my parents to get me an agent, because they didn't really know anything about the business. The closest thing was I had a grandfather who was a cantor. They finally got me an agent when I was 13, and literally I have the same agent that I work with today. I do my first cartoon series, which is Hello Kitty. I was Hello Kitty. And that's where I met Cree Summer. She was the bad cat. I also booked my first on-camera show, which was a show with Mr. T, and I also got to do theater. And a ton of animation: Care Bears, Beetlejuice, My Pet Monster, all that stuff recorded up in Toronto.
What do you enjoy most about voice over?
On camera is so much fun, and then there are things that are really lovable about voiceover. I work here every day in my pajamas. It doesn't matter. I get to be super mom to my kids and my dogs, and I get to go do a yoga class in between a job on my computer. You don't have to worry about hair and makeup and lighting, and you get to play with extraordinary, amazing humans.
Animation is always more fun, especially if there's a full cast, because you're playing off each other. There's an energy. Teen Titans, we have loved each other for 20 years. Been through so much life together: marriages, divorces, deaths of parents, joys, sadness. We're family. 20 years, right? And so you can't really compare that to being alone in a studio for four hours.
What was a great moment for you as a voice actor?
I was such a big fan of The Little Mermaid growing up. My dad just passed two years ago, and we sold the house, and there was a poster still on my bedroom wall of Ariel. I used to run around impersonating her. That same director that used to change names on my script brought me in to do the guide tracking. That's when they bring in someone like us, and then they say, “Hey, Angelina Jolie, do you want to do this part?” We've done the groundwork for you. And you say yes, because sometimes you get to keep it, which happened in Mermaid.
So I'm recording some tracks for The Little Mermaid 2 and they're filming me, so there's a lot of my expressions on this mermaid character. And to play her daughter, and also to go in the studio and look at her and sing a duet with her? I could have died the next day. And she was so nice. She shook my hand. I burst into tears.
How did your voice over career unfold?
I grew up in Toronto, where there's a lot of American production, a lot of runaway production, a lot of Canadian production, so you really get a good resume before you come out. When I came here, I had some people who knew who I was or knew my work. Animation is a pretty small world, and they like to stick to people that they know, because studio time is expensive. If they know you can give three characters, they only have to spend one SAG scale fee. So it's a hard world to break into.
Even when I first moved here, I was two eviction notices broke. Actually, the woman who gave me my first job in LA was the woman who gave me Hello Kitty when I was 13. I had two notices on my door, and Marsha Goodman called and said, “You want to come be in the new Gadget Boy and Heather series?” I moved here in '94, and it took a couple years to really get my footing. I booked Bubbles from The Powerpuff Girls and Batgirl and 100 episodes of 101 Dalmatians all around the same time, and I think that's when Hollywood was like, “Who's this girl?”
What advice do you have for new voice actors?
I say this a lot to kids at cons, because there's always people that say, “How do you get in?” And I caution people, because there are a lot of nefarious people who like to take money from hopefuls. The truth is, the entertainment industry is the only industry that doesn't care how much you've trained, how good you are, how beautiful you are, how much you want to work. If you want to work as a dentist and you go to school and you study, you're going to be a dentist. But you could take a million acting classes, you could be a brilliant actor, and you might never get that break that puts you on the map. There has to be a serendipitous moment that puts you in a job that people really like, and people really like you in.
There is no one in our world that got there because they paid to audition. It's so gross.
When people say, “How do you do this?” some people like to stand, some like to sit. You have to do what organically feels good to you performance-wise, without letting anyone bully you.
Think about a demanding director, producer or client in a session. What made them difficult, and how did you work with them successfully?
Can we talk about the word “safety”? If you're someone at our level, you're going to get it right between one and three, unless there's something you don't know. You do three in a row, and then they go, “Okay, let's do it for safety.” How safe do you have to be? I have 80 lines in this show. I'm not going to have any energy left if each line has to be 20 for safety.
I have a really famous Fred Tatasciore story. I walked into a video game and he was doing a monster, a pterodactyl. The line was that it swoops in and grabs this guy and screams. And he does this huge scream, and you could see the vocal cords popping out. He gives three in a row, and they go, “Can we get another one for safety?” So he does three more quick, and I see his eyes starting to bulge out of his head. And they don't know who I am, right? I'm at the back. I'm like, “Hey guys, you got it on one. Play back one.” And they play back one and they're like, “She's right.”
Has your voice over career progressed the way you expected?
When I was starting out, like very young, I remember at six, seven years old saying, “I want to be on a movie of the week.” And actually, when I first moved to LA and I booked Sabrina, I was like, “Okay, I'm so happy, I just did a movie of the week in Italy.”
If I had only had an on-camera career, I might be really hurting for cash right now. A lot of women my age are really hurting. Hollywood is not kind to aging women. Even in voiceover you see a little bit of it, but it's challenging. So I feel really grateful that I've had the opportunity to do both, and I'm excited to see what else is coming. I'm always open to new adventures for sure.
How do you take direction and keep communication clear in a remote session?
I'm in my home studio right now, and I actually have to audition for things every day. My voiceover auditions are all right here in my amazing, well-padded studio. George, who made it, is the best in the biz. He's like the booth whisperer. He'll come in and go, “Oh, this plug's no good. You've got to get a different plug in here or else you're going to hear the planes.”
I really like doing my own auditions. I've liked it long before COVID. I don't like making people wait, and I like being able to make it perfect. I also love this about on-camera auditions right now, because those rooms can be unkind. They can be sitting there going, “Impress me,” and then you forget your line and you're like, “I could have done such a better job.” Being able to do auditions from home is a really great gift to put your best foot forward.
Of all the voices and characters you have recorded, which is your favorite?
When it comes to choosing a favorite character, it's super challenging, because I have become symbiotic with Raven, Harley, Bubbles. These people live in me all the time. Once you create a character, they live in your head, and when it's their turn they come out and play. Harley in the DC Super Hero Girls is a completely different performance than in a video game, and I know how to bring her into that world because I am her.
In terms of my favorite job, even that's hard. Being Batgirl beside Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy, it's crazy. What a magical, pinch-myself-every-moment time.
And if I know I'm doing a [Harley] video game for four hours, I'm not even a little cranky. Any Harley game. I did one yesterday. It's like my therapy. I get crazy and I get to say anything.
Describe your voice and your style.
When you have an audition you get sides, which is a portion of the script with dialogue and stage directions, which you have to read, because in voiceover, if the line is “Whoa,” and you see a hot guy or you're falling off a cliff, it's two different lines. Sometimes we get a show bible. We'll often get a drawing, which I love. I'll put the drawing and the script side by side, and the more specific the better. She's 12, she has braces, she's from England. You start going down the list of things you're going to pack in your tool kit.
I will do auditions in my studio for 10 minutes, or I'll take three hours. I like to give them something they never thought of, because everybody's going to be doing exactly what's in the stage directions, and hundreds, maybe thousands of people are trying out. So what sets you apart? If you've got a really strange, unattractive shellfish creature but you make her Jessica Rabbit, what a fun choice. Maybe in squid land she's super hot. I like to sit. And I'll send three different versions of pretty much every audition.
What is the biggest audience your voice has reached?
Very few people can say, “I was Batgirl and Harley and Raven and Timmy and Bubbles and Twilight.” They're all really beautiful, iconic roles that have touched people around the world. When we meet people at cons, they say, “Oh my God, I thought my life was over till I met Raven,” or “Fairly OddParents got me through my parents' divorce.” You don't realize how much impact some of these shows have on people, and it's really beautiful. It's one of the reasons I love doing cons, just being able to give back, because truthfully, Hollywood doesn't cherish their voiceover stars anywhere near what fans do.
One of my favorite stories is my dad. He was quite sick when he was getting older, and he was in a wheelchair, and he didn't want to go out. And I was like, “You've got to come, this is Toronto Comic-Con.” I really dragged him. He came in first and he sat in the front, and then the room filled up behind him, and then they bring me out on stage, and my dad was like, “Oh my God.” I don't think he realized what really happened to his baby girl.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your demo list.
Technically my name's Tara. I'm named for my grandmother on my mother's side, who was Russian Jewish, and her name was Tamara, and my maiden name is Cherendoff. So my parents thought it would be cruel to have a kindergartner spell out Tamara Cherendoff, so they took the first two and the last two [letters].
I had a friend that was casting at Disney for a little while, and he told me he started putting a different name on my audition clips, because there's always a suit that goes, “Oh, Tara's on everything, let's bring in some new blood.” And they'd play my audition and go, “Oh, we want that chick!” And he'd go, “That's Tara.”
On the My Little Pony movie, I did scratch for the two lead characters, and at the end of the day they gave me five different roles in the film. And I booked Loki in a closet in my rented house in Toronto, when I was filming.
Tara Strong's Full Biography
Tara Strong began her acting career at the age of 13 in Toronto, Canada. She landed several TV, film, and musical theater roles as well as her first lead in an animated series as the title role of "Hello Kitty." After a short run at Toronto's Second City theater company, she moved to Los Angeles with an extensive resume that included her own sit-com and well over 20 animated series. Upon arriving in Hollywood, she quickly made her mark in several TV and Film projects, such as "Party of Five," "National Lampoon's Senior Trip," "Sabrina the Teenage Witch," and more. She has an iconic voice-over career, including roles such as Bubbles in "The Powerpuff Girls," Timmy Turner in "The Fairly OddParents," Dil Pickles in "Rugrats," Raven in "Teen Titans," "Batgirl," "Family Guy," "Drawn Together," "Ben 10," Melody in "The Little Mermaid 2," "Spirited Away," etc. She is Miss Collins on Nickelodeon's "Big Time Rush" and the current voice of "Harley Quinn." She is Emmy nominated, a Shorty Award winner, Twilight Sparkle in "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" and currently playing "Unikitty" in the new hit series. She appeared in the Hallmark Christmas movie, "A Very Merry Toy Store." She has 350,000 Twitter followers (@tarastrong) and has used her social media to raise several hundred thousand dollars for kids with cancer and animal rescue groups, as well as using her commanding voices for her anti-bullying platform. She lives in Los Angeles. From between 2000 and 2019 she was married to former actor and real estate agent Craig Strong. However, the couple went their separate ways in July 2019 and, eventually, they formally divorced in January 2022. They have two sons together.