Daily never expected her first-ever voice acting role to turn into one of the most beloved characters in ‘90s animation
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| E.G. Daily (left) and Tommy Pickles. | Credit : Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty; Paramount+ |
Tommy Pickles nearly had a different voice.
Elizabeth Daily, also known professionally as E.G. Daily, wasn’t the first actor cast as the iconic character at the heart of Rugrats. In a recent catch-up with PEOPLE, Daily reflects on landing the role.
At the time of the audition, Daily, now 64, says she was working on a musical in Los Angeles, which kept her busy.
“I was doing the musical because I just missed having a band, and I didn’t have a band at that time,” she explains. “So I was like, ‘I’ll do this musical that was offered to me,’ that actually was on Broadway and starred Deborah Harry. And then it folded on Broadway and they shipped this up to L.A. and they cast me in this play at the Roxy.”
Daily continues, “And then I ended up getting a major record deal from this play, [Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap], and then I also got an agent who worked with me and said, ‘You should do voice work. You’re really good with your voice.’ ”
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| E.G. Daily with a Tommy Pickles mascot in 2001. | Vince Bucci/Gettty |
Always up for a challenge, Daily agreed to consider voice acting roles. Having a bit of acting experience under her belt, from theater to film and television, she was unfamiliar with the process but excited for it.
“I’d only done lots of movies and TV, but I didn’t know the whole framework of cartoons,” she shares. “And I wasn’t one of those people that did cosplay or went to Comic-Cons back then. I went on this audition and I was the first person in that room. And they said, ‘We need to replace someone that’s on this series. And we were looking for a different voice.’ “
“So I went in, I looked at the claymation. I saw the little character. And I was like, ‘Huh, I think I could do that voice. That sounds like a voice I’ve been doing since I was a little girl,’” she recalls.
Daily notes that she and her friends would “always do these little voices” as they played together growing up — so she channeled one of those voices for the audition.
“I had no idea what I was getting myself into. And my agent called back and said, ‘You did really well and they booked you,’ ” she remembers.
It was exciting, but a little bit daunting to come in and redo a role that had previously been recorded by another voice actor.
“I had to go back in when they cast me and redo all the voice for an entire season that another person had done,” she shares. “So I had to actually re-loop all of her lines in. And the beautiful thing was that because I’m a singer, I would just say, ‘Oh, okay. No problem. Send me the tracks of her dialogue.’ ”
She continues, “I would listen and I just started to play with the melodies of how that person did the line. So I was able to loop an entire series, an entire season, really rapidly because the musical sense of my ear was like, ‘I’ll just listen to it and learn it like a song.’ ”
Decades later, Daily calls the process “miraculous” and still can’t believe how quickly it launched her voice acting career.
“My first cartoon ever was Rugrats. And from that point on, I went on to do Curious George and Powerpuff Girls and Jungle Cubs and Louie [in Quackpack] and Knothead [in The New Woody Woodpecker Show] ... It just went on and on and on from what really started as me saying yes to doing a musical play that I wanted to be in because I didn’t want to have to put a band together,” she says. “So I always say to people, ‘Go reach out to those things you love and just go do them, and magic happens.’ ”
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| ‘The Rugrats Movie’. | Nickelodeon Movies/Kobal/Shutterstock |
Rugrats was on the air from 1991 to 2004, but has survived the test of time.
“None of us expected it. None of us expected any of it,” she says of the show’s success. “We kind of went in just very blind. And after a while, a few years, then it was like, ‘Oh, we won an Emmy.’ And we’d all be super grateful. Like, ‘Oh, that’s so beautiful.’ And then the next thing it’s like, ‘Oh, they’re picking up another season.’ ‘Oh, wonderful.’ ‘Oh, now they want to do a feature film.’ So it was kind of like a slow burn of success. Nobody was overwhelmed by it.”
Daily continues, “Every turnaround, we’d get another pleasant surprise. It was never overwhelming. It always just felt good and joyful. And it was a real job to be grateful for. It was a really sweet job to do, especially being my first cartoon, to be so successful.”
Sharing it with the cast — such as Nancy Cartwright, Cheryl Chase, Kath Soucie, Cree Summer and more — made the experience that much sweeter.
“We had all been working together for years. We’re like a family. We still are,” Daily tells PEOPLE. “I mean, I’m still really close with a lot of the people on that show. We were having babies and getting married and life was happening while we were doing that show. And so it was sort of like unexpected and pleasant surprises.”
Not only did Daily appear in all 172 episodes across all nine seasons from 1991 to 2004, but she would also reprise the role for the three films The Rugrats Movie (1998), Rugrats in Paris: The Movie (2000), and The Wild Thornberrys crossover Rugrats Go Wild (2003), as well as the sequel series All Grown Up! (2003-2008) and the 2021 Rugrats reboot series for Paramount+ and Nickelodeon. The series follows Tommy and his friends as they live and communicate in their world, while the adult parents who care for them, with a distinct communication barrier, live in theirs.
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