ELKO — Michaela Jill Murphy — an actress best known for voicing rough-and-tumble adventurer Toph Beifong in the 2000s Nickelodeon animated series "Avatar: The Last Airbender" — spoke at the recent 2024 Elko Pop Con, where she shared stories of her experiences in the entertainment world. Murphy said recording lines for Toph was a Tuesday afternoon memory for her when she was 12 and 13 years old. “Sometimes it was every Tuesday, sometimes it was every other Tuesday.
So in my head it was like, oh, it’s Tuesday. I have to leave early to go record "Avatar," at, like, 3:30 in the afternoon.” She said the studio was in Burbank, California, "and there was a big old metal gate, and you had to push the button, and tell the front desk who you were.
” "I just remember hearing ‘beep’ and opening a big door. She said there was a kitchen near the studio and "sometimes they had fresh popcorn." “So I have all these little sensory memories.
The actual recording, it was often just me, because scheduling is tricky,” she said. “Sometimes [Mae Whitman] Katara or [Jack De Sena] Sokka would be there. Occasionally [Dante Basco] Zuko or [Grey DeLisle] Azula, just depending on scheduling.
They tried to have multiples so at least one person was with an actor to record.” Still, she added, “There wasn't a whole group of us recording at one time until the last episode.” As Zach Tyler Eisen, the voice actor for Aang, lived in New York, the rest of the cast did not meet him until the premiere event for the final four episodes.
While Murphy and Eisen were tweens when recording for the show, the rest of the main cast were over 18. She said her ease of recording lines alone was “a testament to the casting director, Andrea Romano, who directed most of our childhoods. She’s just really good at the job.
So it never felt lonely and I never felt like I was missing something.” She said the show’s strong writing was the other piece of the puzzle. Solid acting performances tend to go hand-in-hand with solid scripts, she said.
Michaela Jill Murphy as child. “Because of those two things, it was never a hard thing for me to do. All I had to do was be sassy, which was very easy,” she said, “especially at age 12 and 13, as my mother will attest.
” Murphy originally hails from Indiana, but moved to Los Angeles at age 4 in 1998 because her mother craved sunshine and opportunity, she said. “About a year later, I think, I asked my mom if I could be in commercials, because a friend of mine at the school I was going to was in a commercial and was getting paid for it. I was really into that idea,” she said.
Michaela Jill Murphy interacts with fans at her Elko Pop Con 2024 booth. “It was just me and my mom. So she was very transparent with me about what things cost and how expensive things were.
And so if we were to make a choice, she was like, ‘cool, we have to pick one.’” Murphy said her mom was supportive of her interests, letting her participate in local theater productions of “Oliver” and “Annie.” “She said, ‘OK, you're serious.
You showed up to rehearsals. You liked it, you performed, you did the thing. Let's get some headshots and try it.
And at the time, it was a very different era — at this point it was around 2000. We literally walked door-to-door with a little stack of headshots,” Murphy said. “We started with commercials, and then a couple years went by and I had a bit of an awkward growth phase — had really short hair, a bunch of teeth fell out — and my agent was like, ‘Hey, we're starting this voiceover department.
’ I wasn't booking as much at that moment, and, thankfully, I could read really well, because my mom was big on reading and not watching TV," she said. “So that's how I got started in voiceover. My first voice I did was in ‘Finding Nemo,’” where she provided background chatter for baby fish and turtles along with a few other children.
“I did a lot of background work for the first few years,” portraying background bit roles for films like “Night at the Museum” and “Spider-Man 2.” She is credited for her child acting under the alias Jessie Flower. The character Toph Beifong from "Avatar: The Last Airbender.
" Around age 9 or 10, Murphy started auditioning for new roles and landed cartoon parts such as Chaca in “Kronk’s New Groove” and “The Emperor’s New School,” a minor character in “Avatar: The Last Airbender” named Meng — and her personal favorite role other than Toph and Young Franny in Disney’s “Meet the Robinsons.” “It's one of my mom's favorite movies ever, and it's one of mine as well. The character I played, first of all, is probably the most similar to me in real life.
She's very sassy, she loves crafts and science and music and looking cute,” Murphy said. Also, the movie’s central message is meaningful to her and her mother, she added. “‘Keep moving forward’ was something that we said a lot when I was a kid and as I grew up, she constantly returned to that.
” Murphy said the “Avatar: The Last Airbender” showrunners were impressed with her and eventually asked her to audition for Toph. When the audition tape was due, she was visiting her grandparents in Indiana, which left her in a tricky situation. “This was 2006 or 2007, so it was different from the technology of today.
We had to drive 45 minutes to a music store that happened to have a studio in the back, and they recorded the audition for me and my grandma at the time.” Michaela Jill Murphy signs an "Avatar: The Last Airbender" comic book. The script involved a battle between Toph and a pro wrestler named The Boulder.
Murphy’s grandmother read lines for the former and she read the latter. Murphy said “Avatar: The Last Airbender” stands out from most animated shows in that the characters’ facial features and expressions often emulated those of their actors. Also, in her experience, creating a character is an active process.
“You have to, generally, have your character to find your actor, and then they kind of mesh together. You can't go and be like, ‘This is the character’ and try to force it on somebody. It kind of moves and grows, which is something I've been learning a lot about.
” A casting director might audition a large group of people and only see one of them as the character, even though all of them did a great job, she noted. Does she see a part of herself in Toph? “I turned down a part of me that likes shopping and likes feeling pretty and turned up the part that likes to run around barefoot and just be loud and be like, ‘I have opinions.’ I turned up that part and let her live,” she said.
“One of the amazing things about her is that she's so tough, she's so edgy, she's different from your normal girly stereotype,” Murphy noted. However, she said she finds one aspect of Toph’s arc disappointing. “She's never really viewed romantically by anyone.
That's a little bit of a bummer, because everyone wants to be desired, everyone wants to be liked, even in just an admiration way. Everyone respects her, but does anyone desire her? We don't see that at all. Everybody else has a little bit of a flirty moment somewhere, and she doesn't really get any of that given back.
” Murphy explained her approach to preparing for the role. “I don't like to read ahead too much, because then I start building opinions and like forming how I think I should say something when I would rather just be there, feel the vibes from the director and give a first real, authentic read. So I didn't deep-dive and read the whole script and know all of the replies and all of the jokes until I was there, because then I felt my reactions were more natural,” she said.
“Most of the time I only recorded one to three takes for all my lines,” she noted. “Everyone was always very nice to me. We didn't think we were making history or doing some amazing thing.
We just all had a cool voiceover job, and we got to be reading the show and then it was done. It was very laid-back.” Murphy said while “Avatar: The Last Airbender” was a huge hit, she didn’t realize it at the time since internet hype about television shows wasn’t as common then as it is now.
“The show was done, and I thought I was gonna be a doctor, so I stopped acting. I focused on math and science,” she said. “I ended up going to Yale.
I got there, and was like, ‘Just kidding. I know you accepted me thinking I was going to be a woman in STEM. I'm not.
I’m majoring in theater and screenwriting.’ And I went to New York and auditioned for 10 theaters trying to do the Broadway thing,” Murphy said. “Then, COVID-19 happened, New York died.
They put Avatar on Netflix. I went back to LA to be with my mom, because she was super lonely during COVID-19, and it was tough. So I was like, let's go back to LA for a little bit.
I got back into voice acting a tad,” she explained. “And then this year, I got back into my creative brain and wrote something with friends. I've been in an on-camera workshop for TV stuff.
” Also, she will have a voice role in a major-franchise video game coming out in 2025. Over the past year, Murphy posted a YouTube series called “Tea Time With Toph,” where she reacted to episodes of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” while taste-testing various tea blends themed after each episode. While Avatar Studios plans more animated projects set in the Avatar universe, Murphy said she doubts she will return as she is Irish-American and the showrunners are aiming to cast actors who are more ethnically accurate to the Asian-inspired world.
However, she is now a regular participant in comic convention circuits, signing Avatar merchandise for fans around the United States. Murphy said throughout her childhood, her mother regularly made sure she was interested in acting, rather than forcing her to continue if she no longer had the interest. “She was very much like, ‘Where are you at?’ And it was an every-year conversation.
So once I committed, there were some moments where I was like, ‘I have to miss this birthday party to go to this thing.’ She said, ‘Yes, you're an actor. And you said you want to be an actor, so you have to go to this job.
’ “And then once the year was done, she would say, ‘OK, we did another year. Do you still want to do this thing? Or are you done?’” However, working in acting from an early age still had its stressors, she said. She said she has been seeing a therapist to figure out healthy ways to move forward from her childhood.
She said she is trying to figure out ways to be more forgiving of herself and be willing to say ‘No’ to certain obligations instead of saying ‘Yes’ to everything. “I turn 30 next Sunday. I'm trying to take care of my dog, and me and my mom are still getting along, and we like each other, which is great.
And attempting to date and going to the gym and eating decently, trying to keep the hair nice, the skin nice. I’m just trying to do all the things. And that's where I’m at,” Murphy said.
“Avatar: The Last Airbender” is streaming on Netflix, Paramount+ and Amazon Prime. She said she was able to meet Mark Hamill for the finale recording and remembers all the young actors’ parents losing their minds with excitement over him. “I think there are tons of people who have submitted and taken online classes and stuff remotely, and then once they start to kind of get traction or feel like there's a little bit of a pull, then maybe they start hopping back and forth before they decide to make a move or not,” especially because Hollywood productions often happen outside Los Angeles now, she noted.
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