An Arlington, Virginia, native has taken on an iconic vegetable in one of the biggest animated film franchises ever: Mrs. Potato Head.
Anna Vocino said she was shocked when she heard she landed the animated role in Disney and Pixar’s “Toy Story 5.”
“I read on it, and then my agent called me,” Vocino said, detailing how the studio was looking for her availability to record for the role.
Vocino said she thought Disney and Pixar were asking her to do “scratch tracking,” where producers have someone come in to read, and then have another actor record the final version for the movie. But that wasn’t the case here.
“They’re like, ‘no, no,聽to do the actual part,’ and I was聽just in disbelief,” she said. “I was in disbelief up until I think after I even recorded it.”
Producers gave Vocino the option to either record at home or at the Pixar campus.
“I was like, ‘duh,聽go to the Pixar campus,'” she said.
Taking on the role
Vocino said she felt a lot of pressure taking on the role because she was replacing Estelle Harris, who voiced the iconic role in the first four films.
Harris died in 2022 at the age of 93.
“I wanted to make sure that I did it well and did her justice and made her family proud and made her memory proud,” Vocino said.
She said she even got to meet Mr. Potato Head, her animated “husband” in the movie that’s voiced by Jeff Bergman in “Toy Story 5.”
Bergman took over the role after the 2017 death of actor Don Rickles, who voiced Mr. Potato Head since the first film in 1995. Rickles died at the age of 90.
“I recorded my session, and as I was walking out, Jeff was coming in to do his session. So we got to meet each other, give each other a hug, and then have since been in touch …聽and talking about what it’s like to be the Potato Heads,” she said.
Vocino is hopeful that maybe the viewers will get a little more backstory about the vegetable couple in the future.聽“We’re trying to convince Pixar to do a Potato Head origin story, so that we can find out how the Potato Heads met. That’s what we want to do,” she said.
Northern Virginia roots
Vocino grew up in Northern Virginia and traveled around the area with her mom who was a United Methodist minister.
She grew up singing and said she believes it really helped her develop her skills as a voice actor.
“I was in church choir, trained as a singer, played the piano, and I have noticed that people who I now meet in voice-over, a lot of them have a musical background, I think that the music ear helped with the voice matching with the rhythm in the case,” she said.
Vocino does stand up and always like doing “funny voices” and realized it just fit.
“We need actors, we need entertainment, and聽yet we think that it’s all the Tom Hanks and the Tim Allens … we need those guys, but we also need the little journeyman actors who fill in the other roles, like myself, and I’ve been lucky to be one of those guys,” she said.
But Vocino’s life isn’t all behind the microphone. She also deals with food for her other gig.
She鈥檚 the founder and CEO of Eat Happy Kitchen, a brand known for clean-ingredient pasta sauces, spices, and snacks.
The company, she said, started out of her own struggles after being diagnosed with celiac disease in 2002.
“I was upset to find out that gluten was in pretty much everything that I like to eat, being half southern and half Italian, with all the good foods, you name it 鈥斅爌asta, red velvet cake, key lime pie, fried chicken. Like, you name it, I couldn’t have it,” she said. “So I was like, let me figure out how to make this stuff, and I started blogging about it.”
Vocino’s brand is now in about 1,300 retailers nationwide.
WTOP’s Andrew Alsbrooks contributed to this report.
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