Thank you for listening professional#

After a year back in Los Angeles, Whelan called the woman and said she’d like to give narrating a try. The woman told Whelan of the opportunities in the expanding medium of audiobooks. She booked movie-of-the-week roles, a guest spot on shows including “NCIS” and “The Closer,” but the big auditions didn’t work out and she felt a lack of momentum.Īt her Middlebury graduation, she had been approached by a friend’s mother who worked for Brilliance, an audio publisher. Returning to Los Angeles in 2008 after a hoped-for Rhodes Scholarship didn’t pan out, she thought she would pick up her career as she had left it. She attended Middlebury College in Vermont and spent her junior year in a study-abroad program at Oxford University. Whelan played Grace for three seasons until the show was canceled in 2002.Īs a working child actress, Whelan had been primarily home-schooled and tutored, so when the show ended during her late teens, she decided to embrace a traditional educational experience. “There are people who you meet at an early age who you know understand things that cannot be taught,” Zwick added, mentioning actors like Claire Danes and Evan Rachel Wood, whom he also worked with when they were children. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Check that box: Done,’” he said. After she did a reading as Grace Manning, the teenage daughter of a suburban Chicago divorced woman (played by Sela Ward), Zwick said they knew they had found their young actress. In 1999, she auditioned for the “Once and Again” creators Herskovitz and Zwick. Her narration is a raised eyebrow and a tilt of the head. Her narrating voice, slightly different from her regular speech, is crisp and low-pitched. “Any interest in doing something other than romance? A friend is casting a Clancy-esque book and needs an alpha assassin sound.” She stopped the recording, hit rewind and reread a passage she garbled. “Question,” Whelan said into her microphone, speaking as Sewanee, her female protagonist, who is texting Brock. It is a novel Whelan herself has written, “Thank You for Listening,” which is set in the audio industry and centers on a successful woman who lives her life mostly by voicing the words and experiences of others - that is, until she gets paired to read a famous romance novelist’s final book with Brock, an enigmatic male audiobook narrator. Then she turned to the narration of a forthcoming book. “It was defense against genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime.” “This was not genocide,” she said, and paused. This means that she had already narrated the piece but was redoing a few sentences in which she had misread or mispronounced words, including one about Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine. Between bursts of construction, she recorded “pickup” for an article that would appear in The Atlantic. She was told “don’t hold your breath,” that Whelan was so sought after that six months’ notice was required. Taylor Jenkins Reid, the best-selling author of “Daisy Jones & the Six” and “Malibu Rising,” became friends with Whelan when she narrated Reid’s 2015 novel, “Maybe in Another Life.”Ī few years later, when plans were underway for the audio version of her 2017 book “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo,” Reid let her publisher know that she wanted Whelan for one of the characters. “You have a lot of driveway moments with Julia,” she said, meaning that you can’t turn off the car and stop listening, even once you’ve arrived home.

She has emerged as one of Audible’s most popular narrators, said Diana Dapito, the audio company’s head of consumer content.

Thank you for listening professional#

A former child actress, Whelan was 15 when she was cast in the ABC drama “ Once and Again,” Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz’s follow-up to “ Thirtysomething.” Then as a 30-something herself, Whelan found she could more successfully blend personal happiness and professional achievement if she moved her performances from the stage to the page.