For a while, Maya Rudolph was criminally underrated by the Television Academy; until 2019, she had only been nominated for three Emmys. But then it was as if a switch had been flipped and suddenly Emmys were raining down. Over the next four years, she won five times: twice as Best Comedy Guest Actress for “Saturday Night Live” (2020-2021) and three times as Best Character Voice Performance for “Big Mouth” (2020-2021, 2023). This year, she is nominated again in both categories, as well as Best Comedy Actress for her Apple TV+ series “Loot.” Of these, she is expected to win the voiceover award, which would put her in elite company.
So far, only three actors have collected four trophies for their voice acting performances: the “Simpsons” stars Hank Azaria And Daniel Castellaneta and “Family Guy” mastermind Seth MacFarlane. That includes years when best voice-over performance was a jury award and combined character voice-overs with narration. Character and narration performances were split in 2014, and more recently, Rudolph has been indomitable in her role as Connie, the Hormone Monster, on “Big Mouth.” The only time she lost for that role was in 2022, when the Academy awarded a posthumous trophy to Chadwick Boseman for Marvel’s animated series “What If…?”.
Rudolph is once again the overwhelming favorite for the award this year. Seven of eight trade journalists from major media outlets, 10 of 11 Gold Derby editors, 22 of our Top 24 users, and 22 of our All-Star Top 24 predict he will win. However, there is support for other nominees as well. In second place in our odds is the aforementioned Azaria, who, if he wins, would be the most awarded voice actor; one of our editors thinks he will win by a narrow margin.
Then there is the Academy Liebling Sterling K. Brown for “Invincible.” He is a three-time Emmy winner, including one in 2021 for narrating the nonfiction series “Lincoln: Divided We Stand”; an expert and a top user are betting on him to win. And a top user and an all-star believe the 2018 winner Alex Borstein (“Family Guy”) will do it again. The category is rounded off by the Emmy winner “Ted Lasso” Hannah Waddingham for “Krapopolis,” so there’s no one in this category who doesn’t have at least one trophy on their mantel. Voters have liked them all before, but our users say they’ll like Rudolph the most this time around.
