Voice artist Tawny Platis says John Krasinski helped invent the way Millennials sound. In a recent YouTube video, she said Jim from The Office was responsible for “the Millennial voice,” arguing that Krasinski’s early commercial work changed how a generation spoke and how advertisers wanted people to sound.
Platis said Krasinski was already a prominent voice in commercials for brands like Verizon and Blackberry before he became widely known for The Office. Those spots aired in the early 2000s, just as Millennials were coming of age, and she said their extraordinarily casual, conversational tone made a deep impression. “It was basically just like, ‘Hey, I’m just a guy. I’m not really an actor. … You can trust me. It’s like you’re talking to a friend,’” Platis said.
That style, she argued, became genre-defining. For years afterward, she said, almost every audition and job she pursued called for the same kind of read: conversational, relaxed and close to the way Krasinski sounded in those ads. The shift marked a break from the brighter, cheery, in-your-face commercial voices that dominated the 1990s and from the big, over-the-top narrators with deep gravitas that once filled movie trailers.
The discussion lands in a larger argument about Millennial speech that has been picked over, examined and sometimes mocked in popular media for years. In 2016, NPR wrote about Millennials’ use of phrases like “I feel like,” and debates over vocal fry and other speech patterns have kept the subject alive well beyond the ad world.
Platis’s point is less that one actor changed every voice in America than that a particular kind of performance helped normalize a new register of everyday speech. If the old commercial voice was a sales pitch, Krasinski’s was a conversation, and that is the style that took hold.
