Talent Talks

Michael Lindsay is naturally entertaining.

He usually visits with me when he’s in the studio and by the time he leaves, I feel like I just watched a show at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood. He is the Dennis Miller of the anime community: super energized, super sharp and able to deliver high speed, never-miss commentary that also happens to be really funny.

Like a lot of voice actors, Michael leads several creative lives at once. He’ll tell me stories about how he’s working onstage in a very physical production - despite having just one or two broken ribs - and then turn around and voice a kick-ass, mean-spirited ninja a few minutes later.

Most of you first heard Michael when he voiced Amuro Ray in the anime mega-hit MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM. Now that’s one way to kick off your voice over career! This series was so successful in Japan and across the world that the Japanese post office featured it in the second set of their “Anime Heroes and Heroines” stamps back in 2005. (And if you know where I could get my hands on some of these, please let me know. They were never released outside Japan.)

On the stranger side, an obsessive MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM fan working in the Japanese agriculture ministry got in trouble for ignoring his duties and making 260 edits to the Japanese-language Wikipedia entry. And he wasn’t the only bureaucrat making sure the GUNDAM page was accurate. It got so bad that the government had to block the employee access to Wikipedia.

"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam," a ministry official was quoted as saying. That’s the equivalent of Hillary Clinton having to go on record about how the state department needs to stop putting up fan pages for  STAR WARS: CLONE WARS.

I first met Michael post-Gundam, when he was cast as “Joe” on DIGIMON DIGITAL MONSTERS. I tease him that he always gets cast as the “explainer”. How many times has Kankuro warned the uninitiated about Gaara and that special gourd of his? How many times did Gotsumon tell the sad story about the humans wiping out hundreds of helpless digimon? It's a little weird really.

While no interview can capture the full 3-D experience of meeting someone, I think our conversation will make you feel like you just spent a little bit of time with Michael Lindsay. Open or download the file below and prepare to laugh.

WARNING! Michael is colorful; the interview contains expletives & adult language.

Talent Talks: Michael Lindsay