How Clark Duke Really Feels About Voice Acting - Exclusive

Thunk Crood is a giant-hearted kid with a wacky family, who returns to the big screen in The Croods: A New Age. In this installment, a sequel to 2013's animated hit The Croods, the titular family sets on a course of action-packed adventures and stumbles upon a new family, the Bettermans. A rivalry begins immediately, as does some romance between each family's older teens. Clark Duke is the actor whose voice brings Thunk to life, and Thunk is just one of many animated characters the actor has given a voice to. He's Justin Rockcandy on Adventure Time, Ganky/Omega Ted on SuperMansion, and on Robot Chicken, Duke is the voice of multiple characters.

Duke tells Looper in an exclusive interview that voicing animated characters wasn't something he initially set out to do, but he's glad it has worked out. 

"It just sort of happened. I even have a voice I'm doing on a Netflix show that hasn't come out yet. I enjoy it," he shared with Looper. "I think I must have a pretty specific voice to keep getting asked to do these roles."

And Duke definitely plans to do more voice acting. "Hopefully, I'm getting better at it," the actor said. "I know that I enjoy it more now that I did when I started because I try to be more loose with it and take the same kind of room to stretch out and improv and have fun with it as I would with live-action stuff."

Bringing a character to life using only one's voice requires serious commitment. You have to bring personality and emotion to the screen with your vocal cords as the main tool. Duke doesn't have any pre-recording rituals to get his voice in shape, except for keeping things conversationally mellow. As he noted, "I always try to kind of save my voice the day of and the night before, because it's a lot of yelling and effects."

Aside from making sure he kicks things off with a soothing voice, Duke also doesn't practice his lines beforehand either: "I like to save it all for the spur of the moment. I'm not one to rehearse very much." He also shared that voice recording isn't necessarily easier than live-action because there isn't the physical component. "It's sort of like comparing poetry to prose," Duke explained. "It's still performing, so I do feel drained afterward in the same way; I get the same adrenaline spikes. So, I wouldn't say it's easier, just different."

Fans can hear Clark Duke in The Croods: A New Age, directed by Joel Crawford, when it arrives in theaters tomorrow — Wednesday, November 25.