‘It’s been a whirlwind’: the Essex lawyer who quit her job and became voice of Netflix’s hit show Spike

Emily McGonagle was watching cartoons with her sons when she decided to embark on a career change. A decade on, she is a star of a globally popular children’s series

Emily McGonagle was on maternity leave from her job as a lawyer, juggling the care of her new baby and her toddler son, when the daily diet of TV cartoons made her think about an unlikely career change.

Watching Peppa Pig and Paw Patrol, her older son’s favourites, “it occurred to me: who does this job?”, says the 42-year-old from Essex. “How do you get into it? Even when I was watching TV commercials, I’d think: well, how do you do that?”

McGonagle had been commuting to her demanding legal job in London from the family home in Colchester, but was ready for a more flexible work-life balance. She had always loved performing in school plays and knew she had a talent for accents – so why not look into how to become a voice actor?

A decade on, she is voicing one of the most popular Netflix TV shows in the world. McGonagle plays eight characters in an animated series called Spike about a young dragon and his friends. When the programme launched on the streaming network on 12 October it quickly became the seventh-most-watched programme globally in any genre.

“These past few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind and very surreal,” says McGonagle. “It’s just amazing to me that one day I was watching Peppa Pig with my kids wondering how you get into it, and today I’m turning on Netflix and seeing Spike next to Peppa Pig in the top 10. It is honestly amazing. I could never in my wildest dreams have imagined that I would get to this point.”

When first looking into the industry as a young mum, she says: “I realised that with the right training and setup with professional audio equipment, I could do it from home – which was a revelation to me because I had assumed everything was done in a studio.”

With the support of her husband, Ciarán, she converted a large wardrobe into a soundproofed vocal booth and began auditioning for voiceover jobs that were offered online. She started with a few corporate training videos, before getting some commercial TV and radio adverts, even voicing a Formula One-themed go-kart ride.

But the ambition to work in children’s animation never wavered, so she looked into drama classes at her local theatre, then took some specialist courses in acting for voice animation. The roles in Spike came about when McGonagle saw the project advertised “on LinkedIn, of all places” by the Lithuanian animation company behind it. Originally screened on YouTube, its snowballing popularity among hard-pressed preschooler parents eventually attracted the attention of Netflix.

Voicing multiple different characters in the same project can be a challenge, says McGonagle (She provides the voices for 20 in the video game Game of Thrones: Kingsroad, “and that was a lot”).

How does she keep them distinctive? “I write a bio for my characters and think about what they look like, how old they are, where they might be from and give them some backstory in order to bring that character to life. And then I will adapt my voice to make it younger, make it older, or I might add an accent. It’s all about the way in which you move your body and even your mouth itself.”

The characters she voices in Spike include the main character’s mother, a girl giraffe, a boy elephant, and the canine police officer. Some speak with various English accents, some American. “Those were just the accents and characters I put forward when I auditioned,” she says. “It’s not ultimately my decision.”

“It’s a very international team and we do all communicate online but there haven’t been any in-person meetups. We have spoken on Zoom calls but nobody has ever met in person because we all have our own home studios,” she says.

McGonagle’s sons, Finn and Jack, are now 11 and nine, and far too old for preschool dragons. They must be proud of her unusual career path, though? “They’re not really that bothered by it, which is probably a good thing,” she says. When she read them bedtime stories when they were younger, “honestly, they would just tell me: ‘Ah stop, don’t do the voices’.

“Quite often I’ll be going around the house talking in different voices just to practise and they do get annoyed with it.”