Eric Bauza, the Voice of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, Dies at 46. “Who Grows Up Thinking That They’re Going to Voice Bugs Bunny?”
Eric Bauza, the Emmy-winning voice actor who became the modern voice of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, has died at 46. His family announced his death on his Instagram account on Sunday night. A kid from Scarborough, Ontario who studied Mel Blanc as a teenager ended up speaking for almost every character Blanc made famous.
Bauza died on Sunday, October 25, at his home in Los Angeles. Los Angeles County Medical Examiner records, first reported by Variety, list the cause as hypertensive cardiovascular disease.
His family’s statement was short. “Eric Bauza, Emmy Award-winning voice actor and the modern voice of iconic Looney Tunes characters Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, along with dozens of other beloved cartoon characters, has passed away suddenly. More details to come.”
Warner Bros. Television Group chair Channing Dungey put his place in the line plainly. “He followed in the footsteps of giants like Mel Blanc,” Dungey said in a statement carried by Deadline.
From Scarborough to the rabbit hole
Bauza was born on December 7, 1979, in Scarborough, the east end of Toronto, to a family of Filipino descent. He studied in the Radio, Television and Film program at Centennial College and graduated in 2000.
His first big voice part came early. He was Stimpy in Ren & Stimpy “Adult Party Cartoon” in 2003, stepping into a character that already had a famous sound and a loud fan base. It was good training for what came later.
Image: Peter Dzubay, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Over the next two decades he built one of the longest credit lists in American animation. He was Puss in Boots in DreamWorks’ The Adventures of Puss in Boots from 2015 to 2018, and Baby Fozzie in Disney’s Muppet Babies from 2018 to 2022. In 2023 he became Buster Bunny in Tiny Toons Looniversity. His recent work included Rick and Morty, Teen Titans Go!, The Loud House and Avatar: Seven Havens.
Looney Tunes ran through all of it. He first voiced Marvin the Martian in The Looney Tunes Show, which ran from 2011 to 2013. When Warner Bros. made Looney Tunes Cartoons, which ran from 2020 to 2024, he was Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.
“Who grows up thinking that they’re going to voice Bugs Bunny?”
Bauza talked about the job like a fan who couldn’t quite believe his luck. “I wouldn’t believe it,” he told CBC’s The National in 2020, as Zoomer reported. “Who grows up thinking that they’re going to voice Bugs Bunny? Not a lot of people.”
He also talked about it like a working actor. Blanc built Bugs from nothing, and Bauza said the new voice had to respect that. “It was his original character so he was free to do whatever he wanted with it,” he said. “So you have to study up. You have to be on point when you’re in character for Bugs.”
He knew what he was taking on. “It’s just so hard to fill those shoes that Mel Blanc left behind,” he said in the same interview.
To blogTO in Toronto that December, he described the moment the job landed. “When I first got the message that I’d be playing [Bugs Bunny], it felt like I was dreaming because this character is larger than life.” His research method was simple. “Watching Looney Tunes in the morning is my new gym.”
He had a take on why the rabbit still worked 80 years on. “He’s a calm, cool guy, who doesn’t mess with people unless they mess with him. He doesn’t always win and he can laugh at himself when he loses. I think that’s why he’s so relatable.”
Three Emmys and a whole studio’s worth of characters
The work brought awards. Bauza won an Emmy in 2022 for his voice performance in Looney Tunes Cartoons, another in 2023 for the preschool series Bugs Bunny Builders, and a third in 2024 for Teen Titans Go!
By the end, he was carrying most of the Warner Bros. cartoon cast on his own. In Coyote vs. Acme, the live action and animation film released this year, he’s credited with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Road Runner, Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn, Pepé Le Pew, Gossamer, Charlie Dog and Senator Elmer Fudd.
Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
That’s a rare kind of range. It meant one performer could move from a rabbit to a duck to a rooster to a lovesick skunk in the same session, which is exactly what Blanc had done for the studio decades before.
“Such a young kind man”
Tributes came quickly from the people he worked beside. Voice actor Grey DeLisle wrote on Instagram: “One of the most talented, kind, funny, generous souls. I can’t comprehend this.”
Jim Cummings, the longtime voice of Winnie the Pooh, wrote: “I am at a loss for words. Such a young kind man.” Many of the messages said the same two things in different words. He was very good, and he was nice to be around.
Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
For voice actors who never met him, his career is a useful map. He trained in broadcasting, took a famous character early and learned what it costs to follow a legend, then spent twenty years saying yes to series after series until the biggest chair in the building was his. None of it happened in one jump.
What was still to come
Bauza was still busy. According to GMA News, two projects were in pre-production when he died: Bye Bye Bunny: A Looney Tunes Musical, in which he was set to voice Daffy Duck, and The Dragon Masters.
VoiceEditSuiteNewAuto Clean Up now learns you.Learns from numbers, never your audio. Never used to train AI.See how it worksWarner Bros. hasn’t said who’ll voice Bugs and Daffy next, and nobody should be in a hurry to ask. For now, the studio, his colleagues and a lot of people who grew up with his voice in the morning are saying goodbye.
Bauza once described the job’s reach in a single line about Bugs. “He turned 80 years old this year and we’re still talking about him,” he said in 2020. People will be talking about the man who kept him talking for a long time too.
Sources: Bauza family statement on Instagram, as reported by Yahoo Entertainment and Just Jared; GMA News; Los Angeles County Medical Examiner records as reported by Variety; Channing Dungey statement as carried by Deadline; tributes on Instagram as collected by Entertainment Now; Zoomer (CBC’s The National interview, 2020); blogTO (Olivia Little, December 15, 2020); Wikipedia filmography. Photos: Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 4.0 and 2.0) and Peter Dzubay (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Lee este artículo en español: Muere Eric Bauza, la voz de Bugs Bunny y el Pato Lucas, a los 46 años. "¿Quién crece pensando que va a ser la voz de Bugs Bunny?"
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