Beau Billingslea has had rather a winding road to anime.
From football star, to stage actor, to military man, to lawyer, to 80s television bit player – Billingslea has played many roles over his lifetime. But later in his career, the actor has become most well-known for his voicework in anime.
Billingslea has voiced characters in shows such as “Digimon” and “Naruto,” but is probably most well known for voicing the role of Jet Black in the critically acclaimed anime “Cowboy Bebop.” Over Memorial Day weekend, Billingslea will appear at Momocon.
Ahead of his convention appearance, Billingslea spoke with Rough Draft about his career and why he loves doing the convention circuit. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I was doing some research on you, and I know that you were a pretty big athlete in college. I read that you turned down the NFL to go into the military, and then ended up becoming a lawyer. Was there a part of you that wanted to stay in sports, or stay in law? How did you turn to acting?
Beau Billingslea: As fate would have it, I was captain of the football team my senior year. One of my fraternity brothers was directing a play called “The Emperor Jones” by Eugene O’Neill. It was a massive program for him. Because of [the Vietnam War], there was a lot of strife. You know, the football players, we were in ROTC, and the guys in theater arts – they had long hair, we had buzz cuts. They could come and picket our drills when we were doing ROTC, and all that. So he thought if I did the lead role in “The Emperor Jones,” it might bring the campus together.
He explained the role to me. Emperor Jones, he’s an emperor of a Caribbean island, and he’s losing his mind. He feels like he’s being chased by ghosts, and he has a gun with silver bullets. That’s the only way he can kill the ghosts. He has all these monologues on stage alone, and he’s losing his mind. When my fraternity brother described that to me, I said, “Hm! Sounds like fun. I think I’ll do it.” I did, and it actually had that effect. The football players and the athletes came to the play, as well as the theater arts people. At intermission, they’d talk, and it kind of calmed the conflict down between the two groups. I loved that experience.
But I was in ROTC, which is the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, for the army. When I graduated from college, I was commissioned a second lieutenant. They gave me a delay, and I went to law school, and then I went into military action.But in my third year of law school, I decided I wanted to check out a little bit of show business. Our next door neighbor had a friend – a cousin, actually – who was working in New York … doing commercials and things, so I wrote him a letter. He said, “Yeah! Come on down, Beau.”
I went down and spent a day with him. He was directing a Van Heusen shirt commercial. I was on a set for the first time in my life. I was really excited about it. After, we went back to his office, and he told me what to do. I had to get an answering service, I had to get headshots, had to join the unions and all of that. He told me how to do it, and I did. During my last year of law school, I was flipping back and forth from Connecticut down to New York to do some acting. That’s where I really felt like, oh – I love this! I loved this. I went into the military after I graduated from law school. I was an Army Judge Advocate [General] … and handled a lot of cases. But while I was in Europe, I did plays. I played the lead in “Dracula.” I played Dracula [laughs like Dracula]. I did “Bell, Book and Candle,” I did “The Bad Seed.” I did “Street Scene,” which is a musical – my first time singing on stage. I had no singing background at all. When I got out of the military, I went to Hollywood, and you know – did the thing.
Do you remember, once you got to Hollywood, when you started feeling like, oh this is my job? I can do this as a job, and make a good living at it.
Billingslea: I did a show called “Barnaby Jones.” It was one episode of it. Buddy Ebsen was the lead. I got that because on my resume, I had put University of Connecticut, and the casting director, Tom Palmer, had a connection to UConn. So my resume kind of jumped out at him. He gave me a chance to audition, and I booked it. Leo Penn was the director – Sean Penn’s father was the director. Leo kind of took me under his wing, and he would give me parts as time went on. That’s when I realized, okay – this is going to work. Because I had a wife and two kids, and I had to feed them! You know, kids think they have to eat everyday, so [laughs]. I did things like – I became a massage therapist. I took 120 hours at this massage school in Santa Monica, and I did massage therapy for a while. I also did telephone sales, selling pens and pencils. I couldn’t do the law, because I wasn’t dependable, you know? Because I have to be available.
Buddy Ebsen was very kind to me. He told me a lot of good things. Leo was very supportive and very complimentary of my work. A lot of people were saying, “What are you doing? You crazy? You’re not going to be a lawyer anymore? You’re going to act?” But I talked to my dad about it, and he said: “Well, you know, you have your law degree. Nobody’s going to ever take that away from you.” So he said, follow your dream. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go back to the law. Once my dad said that, I was on. Everything else was noise, that everybody else was saying, because I got the approval of my dad.
I feel like that’s a nice inversion of what you usually hear, which is parents being concerned about their kids going into show business, right?
Billingslea: Yeah. Well, I didn’t encourage mine. I figured if it was in their blood, they’d find it. But it’s so up and down, you know. You get a lot of rejection. I mean, I’ve had a significant amount of success in my life, but I’ve also had some down periods where it was really rough. I didn’t want that for my kids. I figured if they were driven toward it, kind of like I was, that would be fine. As it turned out, my daughter is a CPA – she’s the comptroller of a corporation – and my son’s an attorney practicing law here in L.A. Their lives are steady. They don’t have a lot of money, then no money, a lot of money, no money [laughs].
Yeah, a steady income is nice. Looking back at your career, you were on a bunch of action shows in the 80s, like “T.J. Hooker” and “The A-Team” – you know, one episode here, two episodes there. Do you have any thoughts about why you were a particularly good fit for those types of action TV shows, or why you kept getting cast in those shows?
Billingslea: I had an athletic background, number one. You know, running and falling and jumping and all that stuff was kind of in my DNA. There were a lot of roles for jock types, cops. I had a recurring role on the show “Hunter.” It was a cop show. I think I came at the right time in the 1980s where there were a lot of action TV shows. Unfortunately, then TV became all talking heads. All those shows died out and it was just basically talking. I had a stunt double, Bennie Moore Jr. He used to double me all the time. When TV changed, all the stunt guys lost their work in TV, and then I hardly ever saw Bennie. I think the last time he doubled me was on an episode of “Walker Texas Ranger.” You’re probably not aware of that show, but it was Chuck Norris. I remember, we were flying to Dallas, and we were drinking our champagne up there in first class. Bennie toasted me, said – here’s to you, Beau!
With making the transition to voice acting, how did that come across your plate? Had that been something you had considered before?
Billingslea: No, not really. Back in those days, voice acting wasn’t a big deal and people didn’t really talk about it. You didn’t come to Hollywood to be a voice actor. But what happened was, you know, I was developing a reputation as an on camera actor, and I had a friend who was a producer who was coordinating the dubbing of foreign, live action films. Like, there would be a German film and there would be an African actor in the film. So he would call me to do that.
We did quite a few of those, dubbing those movies into English, and then one day he said, do you want to do some anime? I said, “Um, sure. What’s anime?” [Laughs] I didn’t know what it was. He told me, and I said yeah. We weren’t making any money doing it, but it was fun. That’s how I got started. You know, back in the day, a lot of it was word of mouth. You didn’t even audition. Once people knew you, they’d say, would you want to do this role, you want to do that role? And I’d say, sure – what the heck, why not? It didn’t really put much food on our table, but it was a lot of fun. Since then, the voice world has blown up big time, big time.
Are you surprised it became such a big thing for you? I mean, “Cowboy Bebop” is the first thing on your Wikipedia page.
Billingslea: Yeah, it is. I mean, that’s what I’m most famous for. When we were dubbing “Bebop,” we didn’t have any thought that it would be as iconic as it has become. No clue at all. But it was just a lot of fun, a cool gig, and here we are. We did the series in 1998, and people are still [watching]. There’s a second generation now, people introducing it to their children, introducing it to their nieces and nephews. So it has another life. It’s so cool when I’m at conventions, and so many people will walk up to my table and say, “You are the voice of my childhood!” It makes me feel so good, you know? I say, “I hope you had a wonderful childhood, if I’m part of it!”
Do you enjoy either medium more? Voice acting or screen acting? I know you’ve done some stage work as well.
Billingslea: I think stage will always be my first love, because it’s an interaction – a live, present time interaction with the audience. That exchange of the energy between the actors and the audience – you know, you say a funny line, they laugh, or it’s a poignant scene and they cry. It’s very satisfying that way. When you’re doing anime, you’re in the booth alone. There’s the engineer and the director on the other side of the glass, and that’s about it.
Whenever you’re doing voice work, or if you’re doing original animation, you’re in the room with everybody, everybody’s sitting around together, and you have your music stand there with a script. But there’s still no audience. There’s something special about performing for a live audience and having them respond to you in real time. It’s just beautiful.
It must be nice then, to get to do these conventions and interact with the fan base there.
Billingslea: Yes, it’s the best! I love to hear the stories of the fans. I ask them, what do they do in life? Do they go to a lot of conventions? Just to get a feel for them and see how did they become aware of a project they know me from. It’s just a wonderful exchange with the fans. For so many of them, it’s emotional. When we’re in the booth doing our little gig, you would never think that someone would come up to your table weeping because something you did had such a profound effect on their life. But I’ve had a lot of people say that, especially “Cowboy Bebop,” has brought them through very hard times in their lives. So it’s an emotional experience to meet one of our cast, because they connect us with that experience. It’s an amazing thing, and I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to meet with the fans face to face, and chat with them and hear their stories.
Tickets for Momocon can be purchased online.