Hello and welcome to another episode of Not Too Deep. I'm your host Grace Helbig.

Very excited to have Auref is here with us today. If you don't know him, get ready to know him. He's a a gamer,

professional voice over actor, impressionist, actor, musician. He wears a lot of hats and the most recent hat added to his head is the new voice of Cleveland Brown on Family Guy.

All of the YouTube impressions have paid off. We talk about how that came to be for him, how fox slid into his email inbox asking him to audition, the whole wild process of it.

What it was like creating videos, making silly voices on YouTube in 2012, cut to 2020, now a voice on Family Guy. The whole journey, it's such a lovely conversation.

I learned a lot about the gaming community too. Maybe you'll pick up a couple tips and tricks, enjoy this episode of Not Too Deep with Auref's here.

Auref, so excited that you're here. I have so many things to talk to you about. I'm sorry to interrupt whatever potential gaming you might have been doing, but I'm thankful that you're making some time.

Let's start at the beginning. I'm so curious about how you got into YouTube, how you got into acting, that whole thing. I've read some stories that your sister got you interested in comedy and Jim Carrey and that sort of thing.

Talk me through that. How did that go?

I was like a little tight and my sister would be taking me to a house and she would listen to us every week. She's spoken to me all the time. She'd always put on Liar Liar, Blue Striek with Martin Lawrence or...

And so, Will Smith, Martin Lawrence and Jim Carrey, my inspiration. Jim Carrey's goofiness, I don't know, is stuck with me. So I would take that, you know, kids' responders, I would take that, go to school, third, fourth grade, and every Friday in my school, we have this drama class.

But we're able to, like, this little kid is doing whatever. And I would be like a stand-up set. So the entire class would be in front of me.

It was fantastic. Literally, I'll take jokes from a Liar Liar and stuff. And Star Shirts, because Star Shirts had a stand-up session too. I would take jokes from that in the classroom class. I was like, oh my god, like, I find it, I was like, I'm going to do this for a long time. I've ever seen a set that I wanted to be an entertainer.

Oh yeah, when you feel like you have a superpower that can make people laugh. Oh, it's like the most addictive feeling in the world.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, now, okay. So fast forward a little bit. And the internet is created. And this thing called YouTube gets made. And you're working at an ice cream place. Yeah.

Okay. And then this is when you decided to dabble in YouTube. Yeah, yeah. So I was at this place called Cream and Berkeley. Just give ice cream sandwiches all day.

And it's funny because it's like a people coming in the line. It's like a, you just hand them, you make them ice cream sandwiches and stuff. And I would be doing my voices that I was like, yeah.

And I would be practicing. I'll be doing Cleveland and stuff and making them laugh. And some people, I would be like, hey, sir, hey, it's your sandwich. And they look at me. It's funny because they weren't sure if that was my real voice or not. So they weren't sure.

So at that time, you know, I was, you know, working hard there. And I was doing YouTube. And there wasn't really money coming from YouTube. I was having fun with it. And then over, you know, 2015, I had done a video called Ted Place called duty where I impersonated Seth McFarlane's Ted character.

Yeah. And that got like a million, like first time I got like a million views and like a week. And I was like, God, everybody before that got 40K without it blew me up. And ever since then, I was making money. And I was showing my friends. I was like, Yo, man.

Look, I'm a money. YouTube. And my goal is like, Yo, man, I need to quit my job here. Like, yeah, and since then it's wild. Yeah, it was insane.

That's so. And so it is crazy because you start doing YouTube. I assume like you're doing it just for fun. Right? Like you're putting stuff up there. You're just seeing how it goes.

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