Daran Norris

Daran Morrison Nordland, working as Daran Norris, has appeared in more than 400 films, games and television programmes. Born in Ferndale, Washington in 1964, he is the kind of performer whose name means nothing and whose voice is somewhere in your childhood regardless of when you had one.

The Fairly OddParents is the core of it and the best demonstration of the skill. He voices Cosmo, Mr. Turner, Jorgen Von Strangle and Anti-Cosmo, which means he regularly has to hold conversations with himself across a hyperactive idiot, a suburban dad, a bellowing drill-sergeant fairy and a sardonic double. None of them sound related. That kind of internal range, deployed at speed and volume, is why he has never been out of work.

The live-action career is quieter and funnier. He plays adults who have not entirely become adults: Cliff McCormack, the rumpled lawyer in Veronica Mars, across the series and the 2014 film; Gordy in Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide; Buddha Bob in Big Time Rush; Johnny Frost in iZombie. Elsewhere he is Spottswoode in Team America: World Police, J. Jonah Jameson in The Spectacular Spider-Man, Knock Out in Transformers: Prime and Jack Smith in American Dad!, plus English dub work as Tasuki in Fushigi Yugi and Mercurymon in Digimon Frontier. He also turns up as a lounge greeter in The Killer, which is roughly the shape of a career like this.