Aimee Lou Wood loves voice acting, because it feels like she’s “walking around inside (her) own imagination”.
The Sex Education star plays Lucy Westenra in Audible’s new adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, alongside a star-studded cast including Jonathan Bailey and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Aimee opened up about the process of recording her lines during an interview with Stylist magazine, as she admitted that while the process can feel “lonely” at first, it soon becomes something she relishes.
She said: “You can sort of walk around in your own imagination when doing voice work. Especially after you’ve been in the studio for a while – it starts to feel like a den you’d make as a child, which can be a portal to any place and story.
“The lack of external anchors encourages you to create your own internal landscapes. At first, I can find it quite lonely because I am obsessed with the feeling of connection that comes from being fully with your scene partners. I mean, I even struggle talking on the phone – I’d much rather just go and see the person.
“But, like a good long phone call, once I surrender to the limits, I start being able to find the intimacy within them.”
Dracula is the latest in a string of audio projects Aimee has taken on over the years - with The Wind in the Willows and Wuthering Heights among her previous jobs - and it seems as though it won’t be the last.
Asked what audio role she’d liked to take on next, Aimee told Stylist: “I absolutely loved doing Lucy’s monologues – it felt so good to get to perform such substantial chunks of dramatic text, which you often only get to do in theatre. It’s rare to get a long, twisty-turny monologue in which you can conjure vivid imagery on screen, because so much can be expressed visually – or it’s expressed in dialogue.
“So, I think I’d love to do a Shakespeare. Viola from Twelfth Night or Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing or Imogen from Cymbeline – or maybe I even go all out and do Hamlet. Hamlet himself, though, not Ophelia.”