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Ashley Peldon is a professional scream artist who spends hours screaming
into high-fidelity microphones to record various types of screams for
movies and TV shows.
Have you ever wondered how Hollywood stars manage to get online
screaming just perfect? It’s not an easy thing to pull off if you think
about it, and the reality is that they don’t. Just like stunt people
replace most actors for dangerous scenes, scream artists put their vocal
cords on the line for scenes that could temporarily or permanently
damage the actors’ voices. Ashley Peldon is one such scream artist who
can naturally produce a variety of screams that are recorded and used in
movies and TV series.
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“We are like stunt people, doing the hard stuff that could be damaging
to an actor’s voice or is out of their range,” Ashley recently wrote in
The Guardian. “As a scream artist, you have to know the subtle
differences between screams and determine whether they should peak at
certain points, or remain steady for a very long time.”
Ashley’s talent for screaming was discovered at a young age, and her
ability for screaming naturally played a big part in her getting her
early movie roles. At age 7, she got a role in Child of Anger, which
told the true story of a girl who had suffered severe abuse as a child
and featured long scenes of shouting and screaming. Looking back, Ashley
feels that it was Child of Anger that shaped her career.
By the time she reached her 20s, Ashley Peldon had done over 40 films
and TV series, and she was already in search of a quiet life, so she
switched to voice acting. She was lucky enough to receive parts that
allowed her to use her wide range of screaming, and that’s what she
eventually became known for.
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“If I see a bug, I will scream. I’ll shriek when I’m scared or startled.
It’s just so natural, it comes right out,” the young voice actor says.
A scream artist’s work begins in the post-production stage. Sometimes,
actors just don’t have the time to put in a stellar screaming
performance, and some just don’t have the vocal range. That’s where
people like Ashley come in. They can better determine what sort of
scream works best for a certain scene and have the vocal abilities to
deliver a better result.
Ashley says that there are a lot of different screams, like screams of
fear, anger, rage, screams of joy and success, as well as wailing,
screams of pain and effort, but out of all of them, it’s those
expressing grief that are the most difficult for the scream artist.
Peldon says she doesn’t practice her screaming, it just sort of comes
out naturally, depending on the scene she is working on. However, she
does sometimes do up to eight hours of screaming into microphones, which
can feel exhausting.
Although screaming comes naturally to Ashley, she did temporarily lose
her ability once, after she got a little carried away on the rides at
Disneyland with her kids.
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