Julia Whelan climbed into the double-walled, foam-insulated booth in her home office near Palm Springs, California. In preparation, she had abstained from alcohol the night before, had avoided dairy since waking at 6 a.m., and had been through the buzzing and vocalizing of her warm-up exercises.
Her glass Ball jar filled with water, her Vaseline lip therapy on hand, she was ready to work. So was the man who wielded the jackhammer in her backyard, a non-subtle reminder of what it means to be a victim of your own success.
Whelan, 38, is the soothing, confident female voice behind Gillian Flynn’s thriller “Gone Girl,” Tara Westover’s memoir “Educated,” and over 400 other audiobooks, as well as the spoken versions of many articles for New York, The New Yorker, and other magazines. . She has been so prolific that she and her husband have done some backyard remodeling, including blowing up a hole in the ground for a swimming pool. The problem is that in her business, rest is a professional need. “I’m done dodging noise,” she said, taking the “cans” (headphones) out of her ears.
Whelan, a former child actress, was 15 when she was cast in the ABC drama “Once and Again,” Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz’s sequel to “Thirtysomething.” In her 30s herself, Whelan found that she could better combine personal happiness and professional achievement if she moved her performances from the stage to the page.
She has emerged as one of Audible’s most popular storytellers, said Diana Dapito, the audio company’s head of consumer content. “You have a lot of driveway moments with Julia,” she said, meaning you can’t turn the car off and stop listening, even once you get home.
Taylor Jenkins Reid, the bestselling author of “Daisy Jones & the Six” and “Malibu Rising,” befriended Whelan when she narrated Reid’s 2015 novel “Maybe in Another Life.”
A few years later, when plans were being made for the audio version of her 2017 book “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo,” Reid informed her publisher that she wanted Whelan for one of the characters. She was told “don’t hold your breath,” that Whelan was so sought after that six months’ notice was required.
This delighted Reid. “Who doesn’t like to see their friends being so sought after?” she said. (Reid asked for a favor and booked her boyfriend to help tell the book.)
The scope of Whelan’s work is vast. In between the building eruptions, she recorded “pickup” for an article to appear in The Atlantic. This means she had already narrated the piece, but was repeating a few sentences in which she misread or mispronounced words, including one about Russia’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine. “This wasn’t genocide,” she said and was silent. “It was defense against genocide committed by the Kiev regime.”
Then she turned to the story of another book. It is a novel written by Whelan himself, “Thank You for Listening”, which is set in the audio industry and revolves around a successful woman who lives her life mainly by expressing the words and experiences of others – that is. until she’s paired up to read a famous novelist’s latest book with Brock, an enigmatic male audiobook narrator.
“Ask,” Whelan said into her microphone, speaking like Sewanee, her female lead, who texts Brock. “Are you interested in doing something other than romance? A friend is casting a Clancy-esque book and needs an alpha assassin.” She stopped recording, pressed rewind, and reread a passage she had distorted.
Her narrating voice, slightly different from her normal speech, is clear and low. There is no vocals, no upspeak. Her narration is a raised eyebrow and a tilt of the head.
“I’m absolutely in love with her,” said Olivia Nuzzi, the New York magazine correspondent in Washington, whose work was narrated by Whelan. “There’s some Joan Didion quality in her voice, aloof but not disinterested, with a conspiratorial tone that makes her a very compelling storyteller.”
‘Telling a book is really a performance.’
Whelan wanted to write “Thank You for Listening,” which will be released by Avon on Aug. 2, because the heard-but-unseen dynamics of audio, she said, are “perfect for rom-com material.”
It was also a chance to get a glimpse into the world of audiobooks. “It wasn’t until I got into the recording process that I realized how meta it all is,” she said.
As Whelan spoke, her tone changed from conversational to composed, from talkative to narrative. “This is what happens when I get into storyteller mode,” she said.
Once she has taken on a project, she reads through the book once or twice, choosing the themes that she will emphasize when she gets into the recording booth by using different tones and accents and emphasizing certain words. “Telling a book is really a performance,” she said, “and it can be harder to do than acting, because I can’t use my eyes or facial expressions to convey anything to the audience.”
Whelan grew up in Salem, Oregon, the daughter of a firefighter father who served in the Oregon House of Representatives for two years and a homemaker. They divorced when she was a teenager.
As an only child, young Julia devoured books and lost herself in faith. By the time she was five, she was acting in local theater productions.
She started traveling to Los Angeles. In 1999, she auditioned for “Once and Again” creators Herskovitz and Zwick. After lecturing as Grace Manning, the teenage daughter of a suburban Chicago divorcee (played by Sela Ward), Zwick said they knew they had found their young actress. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Check that box: Done,'” he said.
“There are people you meet at a young age who you know understand things that can’t be learned,” Zwick added, noting actors like Claire Danes and Evan Rachel Wood, who he also worked with when they were kids. goods. “Julia is one of them.”
Whelan played Grace for three seasons until the show was canceled in 2002.
As a working child actress, Whelan had been primarily homeschooled and tutored, so when the show ended in her late teens, she decided to embrace a traditional educational experience. She attended Middlebury College in Vermont and spent her freshman year in a study abroad program at Oxford University.
When she returned to Los Angeles in 2008 after a hoped-for Rhodes Scholarship failed to materialize, she thought she would pick up her career the way she left it. She landed movie-of-the-week roles, guest-starred on shows like “NCIS” and “The Closer,” but the big auditions fell through and she felt a lack of momentum.
Upon graduation from Middlebury, she was approached by the mother of a friend who worked for Brilliance, an audio publishing company. The woman told Whelan about the possibilities in the growing medium of audiobooks. After a year back in Los Angeles, Whelan called the woman and said she wanted to try telling.
‘Put little curls on certain words.’
Whelan started out with audio projects and got her big break in 2012 with Nora Roberts’ bestseller ‘The Witness’. It was the first of more than five books (and there are more) written by Roberts that Whelan would narrate.
A second breakthrough came when Whelan landed a gig to tell the female protagonist of a thriller written by Flynn. The book was ‘Disappeared Girl’. After reading it, Whelan said, “I thought, ‘This book is going to be huge.'”
Flynn was familiar with Whelan because she was a fan of “Once and Again.” “There aren’t many actors I think could do Amy,” Flynn said, referring to the “Gone Girl” anti-heroine Amy Dunne, especially an audio-only version of her. “Julia has a way of putting little curls on certain words,” she said.
The book became a blockbuster and the success of the audio version caused Whelan to take her hustle more seriously.
Also in 2012, while she was filming a Hallmark movie, “The Confession,” her father died of a heart attack, bringing with it a period of grief and self-reflection.
Whelan was 27 and decided she would give herself until her 30s to find a solid career path. In 2014, just before the milestone birthday, she was cast on a pilot for a television series, but when it didn’t get picked up, she felt ready to change focus.
About five years ago, she entered into a romantic relationship with Geof Prysirr, who had been her acting coach and guardian while living in Los Angeles as a teenager. She knows why. “It sounds more sensational than it is,” she says. “This is a good man who has kept me very safe in this ridiculous industry. And then I fell in love with him when I was in my thirties.” They bought a house near Palm Springs and moved there full-time, and they married in 2018.
As she spent time writing to others, she began to think more about her own creative ambitions. She was hired to rework an existing screenplay set at Oxford University. Then, at the suggestion of film producers, she wrote a novel, My Oxford Year, about a Midwestern student with a Rhodes Scholarship. It was published in 2018.
That year, she was also approached by an entrepreneur working at a start-up called Audm, which offered audio narrations of lengthy magazine articles. Whelan began speaking for the company and was later hired as head of production. (DailyExpertNews Company acquired Audm in 2020.) Whelan no longer works for Audm, although she regularly narrates articles as a freelance contributor.
Just before the pandemic, she started “Thank You for Listening,” combining her writing with the experiences she had gathered as a storyteller.
Writers say Whelan helped them understand their own work. “When I listen to Julia read my stories, it sounds like she’s calling you to tell you a great story,” Nuzzi said. “When I write now, I try to think like I’m calling a reader to tell a great story. It has completely changed my approach.”
When Flynn was preparing to write the screenplay for the film adaptation of “Gone Girl,” she decided not to reread the book and instead listen to the narration. “Julia gave me the advantage of listening to Amy and seeing the world through her eyes,” Flynn said.
Whelan said she also learns about her writing when she experiences it as a narrator. “There’s something going on that changes when you run it,” she said. “I read the book out loud during each stage of the revisions, but it’s different when you sit down and have the microphone in front of you, when I finally inhabit all the characters and the story comes to life.”
