During the roundtables for Scooby-Doo! And Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery at San Diego Comic-Con, I had the opportunity to sit down with a voice actress legend, Grey Griffin. Grey Griffin has voiced hundreds of characters but she is best known as the voice of Daphne on Scooby-Doo, Catwoman in the Batman Arkham video games and Vicky on the Fairly OddParents. In this roundtable interview, she talks all about voiceover work and who her favorite characters to voice are.
Q: What was it like meeting Kiss?
Grey Griffin: Today when I met them, I kept being that awkward person and was like ‘okay, this is the time to introduce yourself!’ Then a weird shift would happen and I was like the weird person on the outside of the circle [laughs]. Finally when we were doing an interview for Yahoo! they were walking in and we were walking out and they were really, really nice. I shouldn’t have been scared. Gene [Simmons] grabbed me and was like ‘I like girls!’ and smashed my head on his chest and took a selfie [laughs]. 
Q: A lot of animated movies now are not using the voice talent as much as they use the big celebrities. What do you think about that?
Griffin: Well I have an eight year old and a one year old and they don’t care about celebrities. They go to see things if it looks good but I know that even being here [SDCC], that celebrities bring a lot of attention to things. Like Conan isn’t going to have me on but they will have Matt [Lillard] to talk about his project. I have been able to break through a lot of that by doing scratch. I did ‘The Book of Life’, I was the grandma but I did all of the female voices for that movie but then little by little they filled them in with celebrities and when they got to the grandma part, they put a big celebrity in and Guillermo del Toro was like ‘where is that grandma we had? She was really funny before,’ and the studio left me in. When you celebrate art, it all goes for the good.
Q: Do you have any tips for people that want to break into voiceover work?
Griffin: Take acting classes ’cause it’s not all just funny voices, it really is acting. Do a lot of theatre and if you really want to do it, learn from other actors, then when you are really, really good, meet as many casting people as you can.
Q: When you do characters like Catwoman and Daphne, how do you switch gears because they are so different?
Griffin: Usually I have little catch phrases like for Daphne [breaks into the Daphne voice] ‘Jeepers! It’s a creepy mystery!’ usually that’s how I click into it and with Catwoman I’m like [in Catwoman voice] ‘You’re a bad, bad kitty.’ I just sort of have a sentence that kind of gets you into it.
Chris Salce: Out of all the characters that you’ve voiced, do you have a favorite? 
Griffin: I love playing Azula on ‘The Last Airbender,’ she was just an evil, evil wonderful character and really well written. She gets to lose her mind and go crazy which is every actor’s dream [laughs]. I really loved Sam on ‘Danny Phantom.’ I also like to do little old ladies, a crazy old lady in almost everything I do [laughs].
Chris Salce: Do you do any of the voices to your kids? If you do, do they just kind of look at you like what are you doing?
Griffin: My older son, when he was younger, used to hate when I would. He would say ‘You make ugly face!’ But now that he’s eight, he loves it. I make voices for the characters in the stories that I read for them.
Q: With your amazing talent, do you ever just mess with people?
Griffin: My husband just bought earphones so that we can go on Playstation and I’m going to play Batman as Catwoman and talk to people as Catwoman [laughs]. We are going to be posting that on Twitter soon @GreyDelisle.
Scooby-Doo! And Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery is out now.