This Canadian-Filipino performer voices Porky Pig and Daffy Duck – and that’s not all, folks

LOS ANGELES – “We all want to be like Bugs, but we’re all really Daffy,” voice actor Eric Bauza said with a hearty laugh during a recent interview in Los Angeles.

For the past five years, the 45-year-old Canadian of Filipino descent has played both the clever rabbit and the hyperactive duck. He has won two Children’s & Family Emmy Awards for voicing this pair, as well as other characters, in the animated series Looney Tunes Cartoons (2020 to 2024) and Bugs Bunny Builders (2022 to present).

Over the years, the performer has also summoned Sylvester, Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn and Elmer Fudd.

In American director Peter Browngardt’s The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, Bauza voices both Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. The first fully animated original feature starring these characters to get a theatrical release is a zany, hand-drawn sci-fi romp in which buddies Daffy and Porky must defeat a malicious alien invader.

Bauza recalled first watching Looney Tunes on Saturday mornings growing up in Scarborough, Ontario. The wacky violence and daring humour of those cartoons enticed a young Bauza.

“They really shaped my sense of humour as well as my love for drawing,” he said about the Looney Tunes franchise (1930 to present) while quickly sketching the face of Bugs Bunny, his favourite from the gang, on a notepad.

He has a deep knowledge both of Looney Tunes character history and the man who conceived most of their voices about 90 years ago: American voice actor Mel Blanc.

“Mel Blanc is like the voice of God for me,” Bauza said. “He’s the blueprint. If you’re replicating any of these classic characters, you have to refer back to him because he created not just their voices, but also their personalities.”

Watching the special features on the Looney Tunes DVD box sets, which included Blanc’s recording sessions and notes, was a key resource for Bauza as he studied the voices.

The child of Filipino immigrants, Bauza has been doing funny voices to make people laugh for as long as he can remember.

He thinks of the time a teacher in high school tasked him with delivering the morning announcements over the PA (public address) system, as a catalyst for his interest in voice acting. Bauza would relay the information in different cartoon voices, which his classmates found amusing.

Yet, voice acting was not always Bauza’s main aspiration. He first pursued a career as an animation artist. Following an internship at Spumco, the studio behind The Ren & Stimpy Show (1991 to 1996), he worked for the Los Angeles-based animation outfit Six Point Harness.

He soon realised, however, that he was not finding creative fulfilment in those jobs and decided to focus full time on pursuing voice work. Being cast in the Nickelodeon show El Tigre: The Adventures Of Manny Rivera (2007 to 2008) secured him a visa to stay in the United States, along with membership in the Screen Actors Guild.

It was during the breaks in the recording sessions of the Cartoon Network show Uncle Grandpa (2013 to 2017) that its creator Browngardt first heard Bauza impressively do the Looney Tunes voices.

When Browngardt was planning to direct the series Looney Tunes Cartoons for HBO Max in 2018, he immediately asked Bauza to audition. Committed to the part, Bauza took carrots into the booth and ate them as he read for the role of Bugs Bunny.

“Bauza’s auditions stood out because it wasn’t just a straight impersonation of the voices Mel Blanc created,” Browngardt said. “He was able to act within the voices in such a way where it was very funny and very entertaining just like Mel Blanc did it.”

For The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, Bauza recorded all of Porky’s lines first, since Daffy was more strenuous on his vocal cords. But what truly impressed Browngardt was how precise Bauza was keeping track of how his two performances would eventually cut together.

“He imagined the scene in his head while performing as these characters that are so well known and he made it all really believable,” Browngardt said.

Over the course of the interview with The New York Times, the vocally chameleonic Bauza channelled the voice of Homer and Marge Simpson from The Simpsons (1989 to present), Peter Griffin from Family Guy (1999 to present), Canadian actor Seth Rogen and even US President Donald Trump.

Still, Bauza hopes to one day be best known for a voice all his own.

“In this business, the dream is to create an iconic voice that every kid in the schoolyard does,” he said. “I’ve had some original characters that were well known, but none that when you do it, everyone in the room lights up like you are putting on a superhero cape.” NYTIMES