Laura Bailey

The Funimation booth is where it started. Bailey debuted as Kid Trunks in that studio's Dragon Ball Z dub and then worked through most of the catalogue that passed through those booths: Tohru Honda in Fruits Basket, Lust in Fullmetal Alchemist and its Brotherhood remake, Maka Albarn in Soul Eater, Henrietta in Gunslinger Girl, and the title role in the Shin-chan dub. Those are dub credits and few of them are among the credits listed here, which lean toward animation and television.

The specific skill is making a voice sound like it is coming out of a body. Her comic work is broad and physical, all timing and breath, and her dramatic register sits low and unforced. She is also a fixture of the American superhero animation pipeline, where she has voiced Black Widow, Lois Lane and Gwen Stacy for different studios in overlapping years, plus Lagoona Blue across a decade of Monster High films, which tells you how reliable a booking she is.

The work that changed her profile is Critical Role, the long-running Dungeons and Dragons stream where she has played Vex'ahlia, Jester Lavorre, Imogen Temult and others. Improvising a character for four hours in front of a camera, with no script and no retakes, is a different job from reading lines into a microphone, and it is the one that built her audience. Those campaigns became the animated series The Legend of Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein. She also holds a Game Awards win for best performance.