Exclusive Interview
Julia Whelan on Being the Queen of Audiobook Narrators, Her Next Book & More (VIDEO)
What To Know
- Julia Whelan is a prolific audiobook narrator and author of My Oxford Year.
- She revealed some of her favorite books that she has narrated to Swooon.
- Whelan also revealed what is most rewarding about watching characters she narrated come to life.
Julia Whelan can confirm that she has another book coming — but she won’t say a peep about what it is. “I know what it is, it’s all up here,” she told Swooon, pointing at her head. “But I have not started writing it yet, so I’m not talking about it yet.”
Outside of writing her own romance novels, such as My Oxford Year and Thank You for Listening, Whelan is a prolific audiobook narrator who has brought beloved romance novels, including The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, to listeners. For many book-to-screen adaptations, like People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry or Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Whelan is the first person to bring the characters to life.
Of all the audiobooks she’s narrated — there are over 700 — she revealed to Swooon at Creation Entertainment‘s Page, Screen, and Everything in Between convention that her favorite might have to be “the OG, Emily Henry’s Beach Read.” She explained, “Picking any one out of all of hers is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea, but if I go with the first, I don’t think anyone will be offended.”
Another favorite? Whelan had to shout out her own novel, Casanova LLC, which started as an audio original and will come to print this spring. “That was so much fun to record because I wrote it so that it could be done as a duet, so I was able to do it with other actors,” she confessed. More often than not, duet audiobooks are cut together, not performed in the same place. When they are genuinely filmed as a duet, they can be absolute magic.
On the other side of that spectrum, Whelan revealed that Emma Brodie’s Into the Blue was “very difficult to narrate.” According to Whelan, that’s because “every single possible human emotion is in that book.” She even had to portray an Oscar-winning actor doing Shakespeare. All the world’s a stage, after all!
Of course, Whelan is multihyphenate, as an author, audiobook narrator, and actress. For that reason, we couldn’t help but ask what the biggest difference is between audiobook narration and acting for the camera. She explained that the most profound adjustment between the two is whether she can use her face and gestures or not. As she puts it, for an audiobook, “More has to go into the voice to make [a line] land.”
As Whelan is often the first voice we associate with beloved characters like Poppy Wright (Emily Bader) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), she has a completely different viewing experience for book-to-screen adaptations. “I am most gratified just seeing the entire world,” she explained. “I’m one person, and I’m playing all of the characters. So, the beautiful thing about a film adaptation is getting to populate the world.”
Her own My Oxford Year started as a screenplay 14 years before the film, starring Sofia Carson, came to life. “Not only as the author watching it come to life, but as the author who also recorded the audiobook and had the experience of playing all the characters, watching other people play all the characters was a beautiful experience. Again, just stepping out of the way and saying, please populate this world.”
Of course, we’re eagerly awaiting Whelan’s next novel, which she will undoubtedly narrate as well, but we’ve got hundreds of Whelan-led audiobooks on our TBR to pass the time!
