Daniel Lee shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Good morning Daniel, we’re so happy to have you here with us and we’d love to explore your story and how you think about life and legacy and so much more. So let’s start with a question we often ask: Have any recent moments made you laugh or feel proud?
I was one of the main voice actors in an animated short film from a Paris animation school which just recently released to very positive reception. I finally got to see it last week and I can’t wait for it to be publicly available after it goes through the rounds at festivals
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
My name is Daniel Lee, or as the TSA in Texas yelled at me once: “THAT’S THE VENOM GUY.” I am a voice actor, actor, and comedian from Saint Louis, Missouri who feels like he was made to act in movies but for the time being (until I get out of TSA custody), makes really stupid videos on the internet. You’ve probably seen at least one of my videos without knowing it at the time because unless my rosacea flares up I just look like the most basic dude, so I really enjoy the slow realization on people’s faces when they pull a Spy Kids 3 and go “….oh you’re the guy!”
Okay, so here’s a deep one: Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
I was an emotionally abused/bullied child who was extremely easy-to-manipulate, scared to stand up for myself, and too weak to break away from always doing what everyone else wanted me to. I was held back by “friends” who hurt me, I went for a college degree that I didn’t want, and I moved for a job that I didn’t like. A job which consequently took all my time and energy before isolating me in a region of the US I’ve hated living in my whole life. I don’t think I made a single decision for myself until my late twenties where I finally confronted the last of my life/religious trauma, went to therapy, cut off everything toxic to my joy, learned to practice better cognizance of life privileges (that I did nothing to earn), changed jobs, found the time to support my community, found real friends, and fell in love. While I’m still working slowly (and nervously) towards the acting and voicework career I’ve always wanted, I still love my life now and enjoy it every day. I finally enjoy looking forward and planning the future. *cue ‘Little Wonders’ needledrop”
When did you stop hiding your pain and start using it as power?
Fresh into my senior year of high school, still the scared kid we just talked about, I went from being perfectly healthy one day to having ulcerative colitis the next. Unbeknownst to me, that was the start of every serious health issue that would define my entire college career and life since; monthly infusions, daily pain, loss of my immune system, chronic suppression of emotions, losing most of the food I could eat, losing weight/muscle, losing your personality, getting rosacea and keratosis; it was a disease that exponentially inflamed my OCD, depression, anxiety, all of which I didn’t even know I had yet. After I moved for my first job out of college, I attempted making comedy videos online for the first time as a way to deal with the pain and aloneness. Six years later, my health issues are a huge part of my online presence and something that has helped a lot of others based on the feedback I get in my dm’s. Most of us are already suffering, we might as well refuse to let the pain win and find the funny in it all.
I think our readers would appreciate hearing more about your values and what you think matters in life and career, etc. So our next question is along those lines. Is the public version of you the real you?
I think anyone that used to listen to our podcast knows that what you see is the real me, but I’m also lucky that my job/life is not my social media. Now that I invest heavily in my real life, I find that I spend less and less time online. Eventually I may not even post videos at all, which doesn’t mean that I don’t still care about the topics I usually talk about, but hopefully it means that I get to tackle the issues more directly in my real life vs social media.
Okay, we’ve made it essentially to the end. One last question before you go. What will you regret not doing?
I would regret never attempting an acting career. It’s going to be scary since it is full of unknowns (especially the pay), and just because you THINK you could be great it doesn’t mean you WILL be great, and even IF you’re great it doesn’t mean you’re going to get work, but I’ve loved movies my whole life like a child stares at the stars and hopes to be an astronaut. It feels like the one thing you were made to do was to be a vessel for the greatest stories of our generation. Movies are part of my soul, society’s empathy generator, the easiest way to walk in someone else’s shoes and understand someone else’s pain. I gotta be a part of this somehow.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://beacons.ai/senorpequenos
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorpequenos
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/senorpequenos/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/senorpequenos
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/senorpequenos
- Other: https://letterboxd.com/senorpequenos/
