Voice Actor Amir Talai On Bringing the Demonic Alastor To Life in ‘Hazbin Hotel’

Amir Talai voices the always smiling radio demon Alastor in Amazon’s Hazbin Hotel. The adult-trending animated comedy introduces us to Charlie Morningstar, the princess of Hell, as she seeks out sinners to rehabilitate in her Hazbin Hotel to help them earn a place in Heaven. Talai’s Alastor has many agendas in the series including looking to control Charlie and free his own soul.

Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Talai details how he found the voice of Alastor internally early on, the fun in playing such an unknowable character, and why he is in no hurry to know everything about him.

Awards Daily: Alastor seems like an incredibly fun character to play. His trickster nature and sinister overtones. What is it like getting into his head?

Amir Talai: It’s a blast! It’s funny because I definitely relate to him keeping a smile on his face, but there might be other things going on underneath. I love that he is so committed to the smile because it definitely keeps the other characters guessing. I think it’s a really fun element of his character. Like you said, he’s a trickster, he’s just having fun, and yet there are other times where he has extremely nefarious things in mind. There is pretty much always subtext with Alastor, and it’s fun to carry those different thoughts at the same time.

Awards Daily: With so much of his life being a mystery, have you come up with some of your own thoughts on it at all, or given yourself a backstory to help with the character?

Amir Talai: You know what’s funny is I do not like to do that. I know that there are actors who write a whole notebook for themselves. But for me, I like to go as blank-slated as possible, so when I’m in the booth I’m not loading it up with a bunch of stuff that might be right or might be wrong. I just like to make a lot of different choices in the booth and let Vivienne (Medrano), who knows it all, make the choices in the edit that she feels works best.

I don’t know if you were a fan of the show Lost, but they never told the actors why they were doing things. A lot of the time the actors wanted to know what the backstory was and they would just tell him to not worry about it and play the scene. I think there’s something really liberating about that. You just get in the moment and you play the scene and you trust the rest of the team to make it work for the final product.

Awards Daily: Alastor had my favorite moment in the show at the end where it’s the first time we see him actually vulnerable singing about how he almost died, but then we’re also getting more details about his darker desires and things he might be planning. I’m just curious what it was like singing and playing that part in that moment?

Amir Talai: It was great! Alastor is similar to a character I played in the musical Annie, Bert Healy. But what is different about Alastor is all the stuff that bubbles up from underneath. That is the moment he is most broken and no one is around to see how broken he is. Yet he still has that fire, he still has that strength that I am going to overcome and I’m going to show everyone. It was fun to really mine that. I love that that’s your favorite part in the show because it’s the same for a lot of the fans. I think people really responded to this moment where no one is around, so even though he still has the smile he is pretty f****** broken.

Awards Daily: Alastor has this old time radio voice distortion placed over the way he talks. When is that added in the production? Do you have to prepare for that in the way you talk with him?

Amir Talai: I do not give it a second thought in the booth. I operate like it’s not going to happen and then the production team afterwards adds the radio filter. What is really interesting is some people have noticed this and some people haven’t, the level of the filter changes, sometimes it is very strong and there have been a few moments where it was absent altogether. So what people have learned is that is not his voice. That is a choice Alastor is making, he is deciding where the filter is. The moment when his staff breaks there is no filter at all. So clearly he is lost in that moment and he doesn’t have the wherewithal to put the filter on. I think it’s really interesting to allow Vivienne and the production team to decide when we turn this up and when we turn it down to have its maximum effect.

Awards Daily: You have been doing voice work now for a very long time. Was it always something that interested you?

Amir Talai: Oh yeah, definitely. One of my early inspirations was Michael Winslow in the Police Academy movies. I just remember being absolutely awed by him and fantasizing about having that kind of talent and job. So before I even moved to LA I was doing voice over in San Francisco and I did a web cartoon before they were really web cartoons. I don’t even remember what the platform was, but I was doing a lot of celebrity impressions. I did Macy Gray, I did Tom York, and all these musicians. Then once I got to LA I had trouble breaking into voice over until I booked a Family Guy through my TV agent and then that got the ball rolling. But then weirdly after I did Kung Fu Panda I didn’t book a voice over job for 3 years and I was literally going to quit voice over. I met with this new commercial agent and he was, like, you should talk to our voice over department. I said I’m really not interested, I think I’m done with voice over. But he said, No, no, just meet with them. So I said okay and I met with them and suddenly I started booking again. Then years later Hazbin fell into my lap. So it’s wild to think that that one conversation ended up having such a massive impact.

Awards Daily: What is it like singing as well as doing the voice? Because a lot of the time in animation they do different voice actors for the singing versus talking. But in this show all the actors do all this talking and the singing.

Amir Talai: It’s fantastic. I love that Vivienne was so committed to casting people who could do both, because it just feels more seamless. I love doing the rehearsals ahead of time with Sam (Haft), one of the composers, because some of the songs are quite challenging. So it’s fun to just be able to do two lyrics and absolutely nail them and then move on to the next two. If I were doing these songs on Broadway eight times a week they would be killers. But being able to take our time in the booth and really nail them so when people listen to the soundtrack they are just blown away, it’s a blast.

It’s funny, you never know what that role is going to be that takes advantage of all of your disparate skills. Then a thing like the Hazbin Hotel falls into your lap. Where your voice quality is perfect for it, the accent you happen to be great at is what they need, you can sing, there is comedy, there is darkness, there is opportunity for improv. It feels like just a perfect confluence and when I found out it was a musical too, I was like oh, my God, this is incredible.

Awards Daily: Where did the voice of Alastor come from? Was there something they asked for in particular? Or was it something you came up with?

Amir Talai: It’s really wild. As I said, I had done Bert Healy in Annie at the Hollywood Bowl and Bert Healy is the one who sings You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile. It is just that one scene that he has in the musical and Vivienne was looking to cast this role. I guess some of the usual suspects weren’t quite doing it for her. She went to YouTube and typed in Bert Healey singing and a bootleg of me showed up. She went that’s the guy. So they brought me in to audition and I was, like, “You know I actually played Bert Healy.” They were, like, yeah, we know. What I had done for Bert was pretty straightforward old-timey radio man. (In voice) “Well, it’s time for another edition of the happy hour with Bert Healey.” Then for Alastor it was about using what I had done there with the specific voice quality and accent and giving it that darkness or that s***** sassiness at times and the singing. It was about taking the germ of something that I had years prior and then blowing it up into something deeper and cooler.

Awards Daily: You mentioned that you don’t really think about the back story, so I’m guessing you don’t really have predictions or hopes for your character in the future?

Amir Talai: You know, it’s funny people ask me that sometimes and genuinely the only hope that I have is Alastor sticks around for five or six or seven seasons. That’s the only hope. Because frankly everything that Vivienne, Sam and Andrew (Underberg) have given me to do has been so fun that I completely trust them. Whether they decide they want him to be redeemed and go to heaven or become an awful serial killer and brutally murder Charlie. Whatever they want, I absolutely trust them and I know it’ll be super, super fun. If he turns out to be beloved or despised I’m sure it’ll be in service of a great story. So I don’t think forward. I’m just smelling all these incredible flowers.