Mum quits job as lawyer to voice Netflix cartoon

Emily McGonagle needed a career that better suited family life

A mum says she left her late-night legal career behind for voiceover work from home where she can care for her children.

Emily McGonagle started her working life as a lawyer in the capital, often finishing at 03:00, but started to question whether she could sustain it long term.

After having children, she decided to seek something “more flexible” than her daily commute from Colchester to Canary Wharf, and pivoted to voiceover work in 2019.

The 42-year-old voices eight characters for the children’s television series Spike, which premiered on Netflix on 12 October and is its number one children’s show on the site in the UK.

The cartoon began as a preschool animation on YouTube called Fire Spike!, which was about the adventures of a dragon and his friends.

It was created by a Lithuanian company called Bored Panda, founded in 2009.

When McGonagle joined the team, it had “less than 1,000 subscribers and minimal views”.

It now has 1.25m subscribers and was the seventh most-watched Netflix show globally in its first week.

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McGonagle’s curiosity was stirred while her toddlers were watching television.

She said: “I just kind of always wondered about it, and then I was also watching a lot of kids’ TV, like Paw Patrol and Peppa Pig, on repeat.

“I’d be like, ‘Oh, that’ll be such a cool job. I’d love to do that,’ but how on earth do you get into it?’.

“I kind of just wrote it off because I don’t have an acting background.”

The cartoon follows the adventures of a dragon and his friends

She told BBC Essex how she filled her home studio with professional audio equipment, and after several months of auditioning, got her first gig with Google.

She did commercials, signed up to some acting groups in Colchester and did a six-week acting course in London.

Three years ago she saw the advert for Spike.

“If you’d have asked me, when I was watching Peppa Pig all those years ago with my kids, that I’d be hearing my own voice on radio and Netflix, it would be beyond my wildest expectations.”

Ahead of its Netflix debut, Bored Panda group’s head of animation, Jonas Dovydaitis, said on social media he could not “get over how cool” that children around the world could now watch the show on the platform.

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