If you play EA Sports’ UEFA Euro 2008 – a soccer video game – the voice of the stadium announcer calling the action belongs to a Tacoma guy.
As often as you score a goal, you’ll hear Olav van Zijl yell, “Doelpunt!”
Did I mention you have to play the Dutch version to hear him?
Van Zijl (pronounced “von Zale”) got his start in business pedaling through the streets of Amsterdam as a young, self-employed bicycle messenger. He grew that venture to more than 40 employees before he sold it. Now, the 39-year-old world traveler peddles his Dutch speaking skills as a full-time voice professional.
I caught up with van Zijl last week before he left town for a shoot on the Seattle set of an independent film. He coaches the lead actress through the scenes when she must speak authentic Dutch. Van Zijl also has a four-line speaking part in the film.
Not bad for a guy who got his start in the voice business less than two years ago.
“It was a fluke,” van Zijl said.
While searching a popular online marketplace, he saw an advertisement for a Dutch speaker to record a radio commercial in Portland.
Sure, he already had a decent job as a truck driver picking up organic produce from farms from Port Townsend to Mount Vernon for a Kent-based delivery company. And yet …
“Why not?” van Zijl said. “I didn’t have any (voice) training. But they wanted someone who spoke Dutch, and I speak Dutch. So I called. They asked if I had a demo (recording) I could send them, and I said, ‘Sure.’”
But he didn’t have a recording of his past voice work, because he hadn’t done any. So he went to Radio Shack, bought a digital recorder and read into it an Amsterdam newspaper article about budget troubles with a subway system being built there.
SuperDigital, the Portland production company, hired him as the voice of Citibank’s advertisement in the Netherlands.
“I called him ‘One-Take Jake,’” said Erik Aimes, the commercial producer, who marveled at van Zijl’s ability to nail Citibank script in one take.
“It was pretty easy,” van Zijl confided. “But when I went to the studio that first time, I didn’t think I’d be doing this as a business.”
Since then, though, he has tackled more complex projects – including several in which Dutch consumers who call a company interact with his voice on interactive voice response telephone calls.
With his voice, he can mimic a teenage boy or a senior citizen.
He also landed a small role as Hans Hacker, a creepy 19th-century Amsterdam church elder in a second independent movie, “Caravaggio: The Search,” which was filmed partly in Los Angeles.
So far, his nonunion voice work pays him a negotiated flat fee for each project. If he gets union work, he could earn royalties.
Van Zijl could never have seen this coming.
As a boy in south Holland, he started working on a neighbor’s dairy farm as an 11-year-old tractor driver. He liked it so much he enrolled in a school of agriculture – an equivalent of a U.S. high school.
“My mom used to call me a jester,” van Zijl said. “And I liked to sing.”
Fortunately, the combination of his mother’s Indonesian heritage, his father’s north Holland roots and his upbringing bestowed on van Zijl a naturally accent-free Dutch voice – a prerequisite for voice work.
The Netherlands, while less than twice the size of New Jersey, has more than two dozen dialects.
Following the sale of his Amsterdam bicycle messenger business, van Zijl helped a friend build a restaurant in Spain, herded sheep in France and crewed on a prawn and scallop boat in Australia. Before he came to the Northwest, he worked as a summer forest firefighter in Tucson, Ariz.
These days you may find van Zijl working out at the Morgan Family YMCA on Pearl Street in Tacoma or occasionally playing drums and singing backup with the rockabilly band, the Siderailers.
“I love it here,” van Zijl said about life in Tacoma. He heaped praise on his adopted hometown.
“It reminds me of Rotterdam” in the Netherlands, he said. “In the Second World War, Rotterdam was bombed out and a mess. It is, I think, going through the same kind of phase as Tacoma … when a lot of new things are being created.”
Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785
dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com">dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com
