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Bauza grew up in the Scarborough area of metropolitan Toronto. At Cardinal Newman Catholic High School in the 1990s, he delivered the morning announcements in the voice of Homer Simpson and produced video sketches for school assemblies invoking Ace Ventura and Austin Powers.
He pursued radio, television and film at Centennial College. He had an internship at an animation studio in Los Angeles - which he got after delivering his resume in an oversized fortune cookie - where he worked as a production assistant and voiced some side characters. He got his name out by distributing a rudimentary demo reel on audio cassette. “I printed his resume, miniaturized it, and we stuck it in the fortune cookie,” his brother says.
Bauza returned to Canada, graduated and was unemployed for about a year, before getting a stint at an animation studio in Ottawa. After that gig dried up, he started making trips back to Southern California. He found work in production and editing, while picking up more voice-acting roles.
“All the friends I made at the internship started working for various places like Nickelodeon, Disney, Cartoon Network. And they always remembered I had this weird ability to change my voice and do funny voices. Years later, they would invite me back to work on their projects,” Bauza told the Toronto Star.
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| The cast of El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera |
In the mid-2000s, he got his first big role after meeting Book of Life director Jorge Gutierrez, who was developing a pilot for Nickelodeon called El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera.
Gutierrez says he had auditioned hundreds of people to play Rodolfo Rivera, the overprotective superhero father of the title character, but couldn’t find the person with the right voice — a blend of Ricardo Montalban and Scarface but with a Mexican accent.
Bauza took up the challenge. He picked up a DVD box set of Fantasy Island, the series Montalban starred in in the 1970s and 1980s, and went home and studied him.
Gutierrez says Bauza came back and performed the voice.
“You know how in movies you drop the glass when you see or hear something? I was like, ‘That’s it! That’s it!’”
Gutierrez says he told Nickelodeon executives: “We found a Canadian-Filipino guy who can do a better Mexican accent than any Mexican I’ve ever auditioned.”
It took a bit of convincing, but the studio agreed to bring him on and get him a U.S. work visa.
Bauza then went on to voice a range of characters in Nickelodeon's CG-animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, going on to voice Splinter in the network's 2D-animated Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. The Fil-Canadian voice actor can currently be heard voicing a variety of roles on Nick's The Loud House and it's spin-off, The Casagrandes.
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