A London Lawyer Built a Booth at Home. Now Emily McGonagle Voices Eight Characters in Netflix’s Spike
Emily McGonagle used to finish work at three in the morning in Canary Wharf. Now she voices eight characters in Spike, a children’s cartoon that started on a YouTube channel with fewer than a thousand subscribers and is now Netflix’s number one children’s show in the UK. She did it from a booth in her house in Essex, with no acting background, and her route is one plenty of working voice actors will recognise.
McGonagle, 42, told BBC Essex that she started out as a lawyer in London, often clocking off at 03:00, and began to wonder whether she could keep that up. Once she had children, the daily trip from Colchester to Canary Wharf stopped making sense. She wanted something “more flexible,” and in 2019 she switched to voiceover.
The spark came from the sofa. “I just kind of always wondered about it, and then I was also watching a lot of kids’ TV, like Paw Patrol and Peppa Pig, on repeat,” she said. “I’d be like, ‘Oh, that’ll be such a cool job. I’d love to do that,’ but how on earth do you get into it?”
For a while, that was where it stopped. “I kind of just wrote it off because I don’t have an acting background.”
Image: Emily McGonagle, behind the scenes video on her YouTube channel
A booth at home and months of auditions
What changed her mind wasn’t a lucky break. It was kit and repetition. She filled a home studio with professional audio equipment and auditioned for months before landing her first job, which was for Google. Her own website lists the setup today: a Rode NT1-A microphone, an Audient iD4 interface and a sound treated booth, which she calls a “broadcast-quality home studio.” She’s available for live directed sessions or can direct herself.
Then came the steady part that doesn’t make headlines. She voiced commercials, joined acting groups in Colchester and took a six-week acting course in London. Her site now lists animation and games, TV, radio and online commercials, corporate narration, explainers, live event announcing and phone messages. Her pitch to clients is a line any character actor would be happy to steal: “From cute kids to grannies and everything in between, I’m a world of characters in one voice!”
Screenshot: emilymcgonagle.com, 29 October 2026
She’s also been shortlisted at the UK’s One Voice Awards three times: Outstanding Live Event Announcer in 2022, Best Character Performance in an Animation in 2024, and Best Demo Reel Performance for a gaming demo in 2026.
The cartoon that grew up on YouTube
Three years ago she saw an advert for Spike. The show began life as Fire Spike!, a preschool cartoon on YouTube about a young dragon and his friends, made by Bored Panda, a Lithuanian company founded in 2009.
VoiceEditSuitePractise the skill that books work.The Cold Read hands you a fresh 30-second script and casting brief every take, then hides the timer so you build your own internal clock.See how it worksYour recordings are never used to train AI.When McGonagle joined, the channel had “less than 1,000 subscribers and minimal views,” she told the BBC. By April 2024, Bored Panda was celebrating a silver play button for passing 100,000 subscribers, along with a place on YouTube Kids. In its post about the plaque, the company said the channel had already reached 230,000 subscribers and its top video had more than 4 million views.
Today the channel has 1.25 million subscribers. Spike premiered on Netflix on 12 October, and the BBC reports it’s the platform’s number one children’s show in the UK and was its seventh most watched show worldwide in its first week.
Ahead of the launch, Bored Panda’s head of animation, Jonas Dovydaitis, said on social media he couldn’t “get over how cool” it was that children around the world could now watch the show on Netflix.
Eight voices, one actor
McGonagle voices eight characters in the series. That’s the kind of range her clients tend to mention. Ethan Shaftel, director of the animated VR piece Gargoyle Doyle, an official selection at Venice Immersive in 2023, writes on her website that “Her willingness to bring multiple interpretations to each of the many characters she voiced, changing accents and emphasis, really helped us shape the scenes and influenced the ensemble of other performers.”
Image: Emily McGonagle
Jejo Sleeper, creator of the animated series Me, The Family Pet?, where McGonagle voices Sally, says “she literally breathes life into every character she voices.” Her YouTube channel is full of short behind the scenes clips from the booth, headphones on, pulling faces at a cartoon on screen, including one on how she makes herself sound eighty.
For a mum who once watched Peppa Pig on a loop, the switch still feels unreal. “If you’d have asked me, when I was watching Peppa Pig all those years ago with my kids, that I’d be hearing my own voice on radio and Netflix, it would be beyond my wildest expectations,” she told the BBC.
What working voice actors can take from it
Here’s Voice Over Herald’s read. Nothing in McGonagle’s story depends on a famous name, a drama school or a London agent’s waiting room. The pieces are ones most home-studio voice actors already have or are building: a treated space and decent gear, months of auditions before the first yes, lots of commercial and corporate work to pay for the fun stuff, and classes to keep the acting sharp.
The other lesson is patience with small projects. Spike didn’t arrive on Netflix as a big studio production. It was a little YouTube cartoon with a tiny audience when she said yes to it, and the voices stayed with the show as it grew. Plenty of the jobs in a working actor’s inbox look like that on day one: an indie animation, a first season, a channel nobody’s heard of yet. Most won’t become the next Spike. One might.
And the home studio is the quiet hero here. A lawyer with no acting background built a career from a spare room in Essex, and ended up as eight characters in a show children are watching around the world. You can see her work and demos on her own website.
Sources: BBC News, “Mum quits job as lawyer to voice Netflix cartoon” (BBC Essex, 28 October 2026); Emily McGonagle’s website, emilymcgonagle.com (services, studio, nominations and client testimonials), and her YouTube channel; Bored Panda, “Bored Panda’s Original Show ‘Fire Spike’ Receives Silver Play Button For Hitting 100,000 Subscribers” (29 April 2024). Main image: Spike, Bored Panda.
Lee este artículo en español: Una abogada de Londres armó una cabina en casa. Hoy Emily McGonagle da voz a ocho personajes en Spike, de Netflix
Know something about this story, or spotted an error? Tell the newsroom.