Audiobook boom has sparked a dialogue

As actors vie for jobs, how specific to be with casting is a growing debate.

- By Davin A. KEEPS

For Mara Wilson, who played the plucky schoolgirl heroine in the 1996 film adaptation of Roald Dahl's “Matilda,” audiobook roles scratch her acting itch while enabling her to qualify for SAG-AFTRA health insurance.

“And I don’t have to deal with the nonsense and scrutiny of Hollywood. I feel like they don’t know what to do with someone in their 30s, Jewish and LGBTQ,” says the Los Angeles actor, who has narrated some 60 titles over the last four years and won a 2025 Audie (the Oscars of audiobooks).

“T can play a queer tattooed ex-punknun,” she says of the roles available, “be a demon, a fairy, an old woman, a little girl, a murderer, a victim or both sides of a love affair.”

Bronson Pinchot — the master of accents known for scene-stealing turns as Serge in the “Beverly Hills Cop” film franchise, Balki in ABC's “Perfect Strangers” and the chef Didier on Netflix’s “The Residence” — has tackled an even greater variety of roles, having voiced more than 450 audiobooks so far. Recording from his home in Pasadena, he has played men and women of all ages, races, nationalities and abilities, as well as “postapocalyptic people living in trees and empresses of fictitious planets,” he notes.

No matter the book or its characters, Pinchot says, “it’s the one performative art where an actor can focus more on the narrative intention than their own gender and ethnicity.”

The pair are just two of the many actors vying for audiobook roles at a time when the talent pool is expanding and casting is becoming a growing topic of debate. U.S. audiobook sales revenues grew 13% to $2.2 billion in 2024, according to the Audio Publishers Assn., rivaling and in some cases surpassing e-books in popularity.