Voice Actor Spotlight: Travis Willingham
For some reason, women find the brooding, bored with life bad boy incredibly sexy, whether he be a live action Japanese Robin Hood, a flame wielding alchemist or a heavy drinking video game mystery man.
Enter Travis Willingham, the man who makes geek girls swoon and all other men fume.
It’s not fair, really. Some guys get it all.
Oh well…
Travis was born August 3, 1981 in Dallas, Texas. Much like last week’s VA, Mike McFarland, Travis has worked on a wide range of anime, video games and even some live action dubbing. Including Mike McFarland, Travis has worked with many of the other voice actors from previous weeks’ spotlights in this series.
Flame Alchemist, Roy Mustang, who tends to be absolutely useless in the rain.
Perhaps best known for his role as Colonel Roy Mustang, the flame-fingered alchemic posterchild of the Fullmetal Alchemist universe, you can still hear Travis in countless other projects and productions.
As I hinted above, Mike McFarland and Travis have worked on many of the same projects, including the Dragonball Z video games, D. Grayman, Darker than Black, Black Blood Brothers, One Piece and Hell Girl. They’re also both from Texas… Maybe that’s where I need to move…
What you might not know is that Travis is also involved in more live action productions than most voice actors, including roles on Nip/Tuck, Prison Break, the coastguard-centric action drama, The Guardian and even as the lovable, troublemaking master thief, Ishikawa Goemon from the live action, Funimation full-length feature film, Goemon. If you’ve never heard of it, look it up on Netflix Instant Queue. It’s beautiful, stylized, action packed, funny, heartbreaking and well voice acted. I can’t recommend it to action/anime fans enough.
Master Thief and champion to the poor of feudal Japan, Ishikawa Goemon.
Travis has quite a few notches on his VA belt, but some of his more recent and notable exploits come in the form of Johnny Ariga, one of Vincent’s drinking buddies in the PS3/360 hit, Catherine, Super Street Fighter IV as Guile, additional voices for Red Faction Guerilla and the Square-Enix PSP title, The 3rd Birthday, Yodai Higashizawa in The World Ends With You (Oh my god, what a fantastic game!) and as the Narrator of Valkyria Chronicles II.
Coming in the next few months, Travis is wrapping production on a few new video game titles, not least of which is the upcoming, hotly anticipated PC exclusive, Star Wars: The Old Republic. He will also be voicing Cyclops in an upcoming X-Men game and has officially been named as the voice of Knuckles the Echidna for the Sonic the Hedgehog series for the foreseeable future. So keep an eye on the man. He has gone and is still going places in the world of voice acting.
Johnny Ariga, from Catherine.
If you’d like to know more about Travis Willingham, including the fact that he’s engaged to next week’s spotlighted voice actor, be sure to check out his IMdB and Wikipedia pages.
