Opinion: Netflix Said “We Got It Wrong” About Margot’s Voice. The Fix Is One Line of Credits

Netflix has apologized in Mexico for a promo that put a dubbing actor’s voice in an influencer’s announcement. After Wildwood and I Play Rocky, it’s the third “star talent” row in a fortnight. Everyone’s arguing about famous people dubbing. The argument worth having is about credit.

Here’s the short version, for anyone who spent the weekend offline. Netflix Latinoamérica announced that influencer Lesslie Polinesia would voice Margot in the Latin American Spanish dub of Hermanastras, the animated Cinderella spin-off known in English as Steps, which lands on Netflix on 20 November. In the announcement video, Polinesia greets the audience. Then Margot speaks. And Margot, it turned out, wasn’t Polinesia.

She was Diana Galván Santos, a working dubbing actor whose credits include You and People We Meet on Vacation. “Context… the voice of Margot, the frog, in this promo is mine,” Galván wrote, “and this is a clear example of how my profession is denigrated and belittled.”

Netflix switched off comments on some of its videos, and then, on Monday, said sorry. “When announcing the voice of Margot, we used a voice that did not match the final dub,” the company said in a statement reported by Infobae. “We got it wrong and we’re very sorry: we offer a sincere apology to Diana and to Lesslie.” A new video followed with Polinesia’s own voice, captioned “Now for real: LESSLIE as Margot in ‘Hermanastras’.”

Hear the dub: Netflix Latinoamérica’s official Spanish trailer for Hermanastras, released on 15 October. Netflix hasn’t said whose voices are in it. Video: Netflix Latinoamérica, on YouTube

Nobody did anything wrong in the booth

Let’s get one thing out of the way. Netflix’s own statement says Polinesia “did a great job”, and her fans have a fair point: Milenio reports they’ve argued that the promo’s handling and editing were down to Netflix’s production and the dubbing studio, not to the creator. Nor is Galván the villain for speaking up. She heard her own voice coming out of somebody else’s announcement. Most of us would have said something, probably with fewer ellipses.

Image: Netflix Latinoamérica, official Hermanastras teaser

An Instagram account that follows the dubbing trade, @acoso.doblaje, went further and accused the platform of “using colleagues’ voices without permission to avoid backlash ahead of time.” Some people online guessed that AI was involved. Nobody has shown that, and Netflix’s statement doesn’t explain how the wrong recording got into the promo. So I won’t guess either. What we know is enough.

Screenshot: Infobae, taken 10 November 2026

The third row in a fortnight

Hermanastras didn’t land in a quiet week. Mexican audiences are already petitioning for LAIKA’s Wildwood to be redubbed without its celebrity voices, as Voice Over Herald reported last week. Then Víctor Hugo Aguilar, the Mexican voice of Rocky Balboa in the Rocky films (and of Johnny Bravo and Hagrid), watched the Latin American trailer for I Play Rocky, in which content creator Tomás Galván, known as Imitandup, dubs Anthony Ippolito as the young Sylvester Stallone.

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Aguilar’s review, posted on Instagram, was not gentle. The printable parts: “Rocky Balboa doesn’t talk like that,” as El Universal quoted him, and “there’s no brotherhood anymore.” Milenio summed up the mood in one line: “It looks like it’s not a good time to be a star talent.”

Here’s where I step off the bandwagon for a moment. Imitandup isn’t a stranger who wandered in off TikTok. According to Milenio, he’s dubbed Albert Taft in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Caius in Tron: Ares and young Daniel LaRusso in Karate Kid: Legends. Arguing about whether someone is right for a role is as old as dubbing, and it’s healthy. Aguilar had even asked fans to back him for the part weeks earlier. “Rocky Balboa and I are the same thing,” he said. You can feel for him and still accept that casting is somebody else’s call.

Famous voices aren’t the problem. Hidden ones are.

Celebrity dubbing has been around forever, and some of it is lovely. Studios do it because a familiar name sells tickets. Fine. Every working voice actor understands marketing. What they can’t stomach, and what nobody should, is a system where the famous name gets the announcement while a professional’s voice does the work in the background with no name attached.

That’s what made the Margot promo sting. It wasn’t that an influencer got a part. It was that, for a few days, the audience heard a dubbing actor and was told it was someone else. Netflix’s own phrase is quietly brutal: a voice “that did not match the final dub.” It matched somebody. She has a name.

Galván’s word was “denigrated”. I’d pick a different one: invisible. Latin American dubbing actors are some of the most recognized voices on earth and some of the least credited. You can name the celebrity on the poster. Can you name the Spanish voice of your favorite character? Plenty of fans can, which is exactly why they noticed in the first place.

A modest proposal, with no frogs harmed

So here’s my suggestion, free of charge. Every dubbed promo, trailer and cast announcement should credit the voices you actually hear, on screen or in the caption. If a temp track or another actor’s take ends up in a promo, say so, and say who it is. It costs one line of text. It would have saved Netflix a rough few days of switched-off comments, and it would have saved two women from being set against each other in public over an edit neither of them made.

And if you’re a voice actor reading this, it’s a reminder that one day you may need to show which recording is yours. On The Voice Realm, Voice Lock does that for demos: once a voice actor switches it on, their recordings carry an invisible watermark and a dated certificate anyone can check online. The Voice Realm says it’s the world’s first voiceover marketplace to protect voice actors’ demos with an invisible watermark. It won’t stop a studio putting the wrong file in a trailer. It does make “that’s my voice” easy to prove.

Say the name

Netflix’s second apology, left in the comments under the new video, ended with “I’m their fan.” Lovely. Here’s how to prove it: next time, print the names. Both of them.

Hermanastras arrives on 20 November. When it does, I’ll be watching the dubbing credits. Polinesia deserves her moment as Margot. Galván deserves hers too. That’s the whole column, really. Famous or not, if we can hear you, we should know your name.

Sources: This is an opinion piece. Infobae (9 November 2026); Milenio (5 and 9 November 2026); El Universal (9 November 2026); Reporte Índigo (9 November 2026); Netflix Latinoamérica on YouTube; Voice Over Herald (6 November 2026). Quotations from Spanish sources are translated by Voice Over Herald.

Lee este artículo en español: Opinión: Netflix dijo “Nos equivocamos” con la voz de Margot. La solución cabe en una línea de créditos

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