Sébastien Croteau, extreme voice actor and coach

Early in 2025, I joined three hours of online coaching in a small group, exploring a subject that had intrigued me for a long time: extreme voice acting. On screen was a voice actor from Québec with boundless energy, infectious enthusiasm and a literally inhuman voice: Sébastien Croteau.

Although I do not use these voices in my everyday work, I learned how to explore them with care, approach my voice differently and develop new characters for role-playing projects while broadening my range. What stayed with me? Clear teaching, great kindness and the ability to share without imposing.

For Sébastien, the voice is living, raw, explosive material, shaped by years of metal singing, sound theatre and vocal research at the edge of what seems possible. In the studio, he works without effects or filters: a microphone, a body and an almost animal vocal force he controls like a musical score.

He is one of those actors who expand what a human voice can express. In Resident Evil, Star Wars Battlefront, Dead by Daylight, Baldur’s Gate 3, Hellblade II, Guardians of the Galaxy and Fortnite, he embodies dozens of characters you may never see him play, but will never forget: creatures, warriors, supernatural beings, zombies, aliens and spirits. Behind each one is meticulous work on posture, breathing, texture, rhythm, pain, rage and fear.

These are monstrous emotions, built from the ground up so that we believe in them and feel them resonate.

What are extreme vocals? Vocal techniques that produce saturated, distorted or inhuman sounds without added digital effects. Widely used in video games, genre cinema and metal music, they create the voices of monsters, zombies, alien creatures and characters beyond reality.

What I admire in Sébastien, beyond the technique, is his undiminished passion, the kind we recognise in one another. He talks about his monsters as others talk about their first role. He plays, explores and invents languages, sounds and cries we did not know were possible, with exceptional rigour and without taking himself too seriously.

He too grew up hearing strange voices: characters that stayed with him from childhood, games and films that made him want to search, imitate and understand. Today he teaches, shares and keeps creating. That speaks to us.

When you discover the breadth of Sébastien’s work, you might think he is the only person who can do it. But he founded La Fabrique de Monstres, an organisation as distinctive as its name. He leads a team of more than 100 artists in almost 20 countries: singers, dubbing actors and creators of vocal textures, piercing screams, cavernous sighs and otherworldly breaths. They share rigorous training, controlled vocal distortion and a deep passion for voices beyond the familiar.

La Fabrique de Monstres is a vocal production business serving game studios, film producers and sound designers. Its network can localise zombies into German, whisper in goblin voices in Spanish or roar as trolls in Japanese. The performances come from human, organic voices built for immersion.

A studio approaching Sébastien receives a developed, documented, tested and embodied artistic proposal, sometimes with an entire team to take it further. It is a more individual, vivid and passionate way of thinking about voice acting. You can hear the difference.

Some people know how to perform; others also know how to help someone else do it with care. Sébastien is one of them. In his online teaching and at schools such as Montréal’s Institut national de l’image et du son (INIS), he addresses an essential question: how to explore the voice while respecting its limits. Poorly controlled extreme vocals can hurt.

His teaching focuses on feeling, listening, warming up like an athlete and testing sounds without forcing them. He shares his techniques with remarkable clarity.

I experienced it myself. During his coaching, I understood how to explore intensities I had hesitated to approach. I rediscovered support, changed intentions and tried different registers, feeling carefully guided throughout. Even without aiming for screams or monsters, I expanded my vocal range and found new creative possibilities with confidence.

What makes his approach distinctive? He opens a path for each performer to develop their own vocal material, with its strengths, limits and textures.

He often describes metal singers as vocal stunt performers, and he is right.

He trains professionals to create chaos while keeping control.

Another Apéro Voice guest to discover is Pierre-Alain de Garrigues, the man of 45,000 voices, the voice actor heard in Tic Tac, Carte Noire and Hearthstone.