Julia Weeran climbed a double-walled foam insulation booth in her home office near Palm Springs, California. In her preparation, she refrained from alcohol the night before, woke up at 6am, avoided dairy products, and went through humming and humming.Vocalization Of her warm-up exercises.
Her glass ball jar filled with water, her Vaseline lip therapy at hand, she was ready to work. So the man wielding the drifter in her backyard didn’t subtly remind us of what it means to be a victim of your own success.
Welan, 38, is Gillian Flynn’s thriller “Gone Girl,” Tara Westover’s memoir “Educated,” over 400 other audiobooks, New York, New Yorker, and other magazines. She was so prolific that she and her husband jumped into a backyard remodeling that involved drilling holes in the ground for the pool.The problem is that in her business, quiet things Occupational need.. “I tried to dodge the noise,” she said, removing the “can” (headphones) from her ears.
Welan, the former child actor, was 15 years old when he appeared in the ABC drama.Repeat over and over, Follow-up to Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz’s “30s”. Then, as a 30-something self, Whelan realized that moving performance from stage to page could better blend personal well-being with professional achievement.
She has emerged as one of Audible’s most popular narrators, said Diana Dapito, head of consumer content for audio companies. “There are many driveway moments with Julia,” she said. That is, even after she gets home, she can’t turn off the car and stop listening.
Taylor Jenkins Reed, the best-selling author of “Daisy Jones & The Six” and “Mali Blazing,” became friends with Welan when he narrated Reed’s 2015 novel “Maybe in Another Life.”
A few years later, when plans for an audio version of the 2017 book Evelyn Hugo’s Seven Husbands were underway, Reed informed the publisher that one of the characters wanted Welan. She was told, “Don’t hold her breath,” and Welan was very sought after after six months’ notice was needed.
This pleased Reed. “Who doesn’t want to meet such a high-demand friend?” She said. (Reed called in favor and booked her friend to help narrate her book.)
Welan’s range of work is vast. During her construction burst, she recorded a “pickup” of articles that would appear in the Atlantic Ocean.This means she’s already narrated piece However, she was redoing some of the sentences she misread or mispronounced, including a sentence justifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “This wasn’t a genocide,” she said and paused. “It was a defense against the genocide carried out by the Kyiv administration.”
Then she turned to the narration for the next book. This is a novel written by Welan himself. “Thank you for listening,” It is set in the audio industry and is primarily centered around successful women who live their lives aloud in the words and experiences of others. That is, until she pairs up and reads the last book of a famous romance novelist as the mysterious male audiobook narrator Brock. ..
“Question,” Welan said to Mike, speaking as Sewanee, the female protagonist sending a text message to Brock. “Are you interested in doing anything other than romance? A friend is casting a Clancy-style book and needs the sound of an alpha assassin.” She stopped recording, pressed rewind, and garbled. I reread the passage that I did.
Her narrated voice is a bit different from regular speech, with a crisp bass. There are no songs and no upspeaks. Her narration is to raise her eyebrows and tilt her head.
“I’m giving her an absolute voice,” said Olivia Nuzzi, a Washington correspondent for New York Magazine. “Her voice has the quality of Joan Didion, separated but not uninteresting, and her intriguing tone makes her a very compelling storyteller. “
“Book narration is really a performance.”
Welan wanted to write “Thank you for listening” to be released by Avon on August 2nd. Because the audible but invisible dynamics of audio are “perfect for romantic comedy material.”
It was also an opportunity to get a glimpse of the world of audiobooks. “Until we got into the recording process, we didn’t understand how meta the whole thing was,” she said.
As Welan said, her tone shifted from conversation to control and from chatter to narration. “This is what happens when I enter storyteller mode,” she said.
Once she embarks on the project, she reads the book once or twice, uses different tones and accents, and emphasizes specific words to determine the theme to emphasize when entering the recording booth. “Book narration is really a performance. It can be more difficult than acting because you can’t tell the audience something with your eyes and facial expressions,” she said.
Welan grew up in Salem, Oregon. She is the daughter of a firefighter’s father and a housewife’s mother who worked in the Oregon House of Representatives for two years. They divorced when she was a teenager.
The only child, Julia, devoured a book and was absorbed in making her believe. By the time she was five, she had appeared in a local theatrical production.
She started her trip to Los Angeles. In 1999, she auditioned for “Once and Again” creators Herskovitz and Zwick. After she read as Grace Manning, the teenage daughter of a divorced woman (played by Sela Ward) in the suburbs of Chicago, Zwick said she knew they had found their young actress. “We looked at each other and said,’Check that box: done,'” he said.
“Some people I met when I was young and understand what I can’t teach,” he said, referring to actors he worked with as a kid, such as Claire Danes and Evan Rachel Wood. “Julia is one of them.”
Welan played Grace for three seasons until the show was canceled in 2002.
As a working child actress, Welan was primarily homeschooling and tutoring, so when the show ended in her late teens she decided to embrace traditional educational experience. She attended Middlebury College in Vermont and spent her third year studying abroad at Oxford University.
Returning to Los Angeles in 2008 after the expected Rhodes Scholarship was unsuccessful, she thought she would regain her career as she left. She booked the role of this week’s film, a guest spot on shows such as “NCIS” and “Closer,” but the large-scale auditions didn’t work and she felt she wasn’t getting enough momentum.
When she graduated from Middlebury, she was contacted by the mother of a friend who worked for the audio publisher Brilliance. The woman told Welan about the opportunities in the expanding medium of audiobooks. A year after she returned to Los Angeles, Welan called the woman and said she wanted to try her narration.
“Add a small curl to a particular word.”
Welan began working on an audio project and made a big break in 2012 with Nora Roberts’ best-selling novel The Witness. It was the first of more than five books (and counting) written by Welan by Roberts.
A second breakthrough came when Welan landed the gig to talk about the female protagonist of the thriller written by Flynn. The book was “Gone Girl”. After reading it, Welan said, “I thought,’This book will be huge.'”
Flynn was a fan of “Once and Again”, so he was familiar with Welan. “Not many actors think Amy can do it,” Flynn mentioned the anti-heroine of “Gone Girl,” Amy Dan, especially her audio-only version. “Julia has a way to add a small curl to a particular word,” she said.
The book became a huge hit, and with the success of the audio version, Welan began to take the hustle and bustle on her side more seriously.
Also, while she was filming the Hallmark movie “Confessions” in 2012, her father died of a heart attack, causing a period of sadness and introspection.
At the age of 27, Welan decided to devote himself to the age of 30 to find a solid career path. In 2014, just before Milestone’s birthday, she was cast as a pilot in a television series, but when it wasn’t featured, she felt ready to change her focus.
About five years ago, she had a romantic relationship with Geof Prysirr, who was acting coach and guardian when she lived in Los Angeles as a teenager. She knows how it comes off. “It sounds more sensational than that,” she said. “This is a good guy who kept me very safe in this ridiculous industry. And I fell in love with him in my thirties.” They bought a house near Palm Springs. , I moved there full time. They got married in 2018.
As she spent more time dressing up in the writing of others, she began to think more about her own creative ambitions. She was hired to recreate an existing script set up at Oxford University. Later, at the suggestion of a film producer, she continued to write the novel “My Oxford Year,” about Midwestern students receiving a Rhodes Scholarship. Published in 2018.
That year, she was also contacted by an entrepreneur working on a startup called Audm, which provides audio narration for long-form magazine articles. Welan began narrating the company and she was later hired as executive producer. (The New York Times acquired Audm in 2020.) Whelan does not work for Audm, but she frequently narrates articles as a freelance contributor.
Shortly before the pandemic, she began “Thank you for listening”, combining her writing with the experience she had collected as a narrator.
The writer says he helped Welan understand their own work. “When I hear Julia reading my story, she sounds like she’s calling you to tell you a great story,” Nuzzi said. “When I’m writing now, I try to think that way, I’m calling readers to tell them a great story. It completely changed my approach.”
When Flynn was preparing to write the script for the movie version of “Gone Girl,” she opposed rereading the book and chose to listen to the narration instead. “Julia listened to me about Amy and she gave me the advantage of seeing the world through her eyes,” Flynn said.
Welan said she also learned about her writing when she experienced it as a narrator. “There’s something that changes when you do that,” she said. “I read the book out loud at every stage of the revision, but not when I sat down and put the mic in front of me, when I finally lived in all the characters and the story came back to life. . “
