Former Atlantan and Whole World Improv Theatre co-founder Anna Vocino has achieved a longtime dream shared by many voice actors: landing a role in a Pixar film.
Vocino is the voice of Mrs. Potato Head in “Toy Story 5,” which opened June 19.
“Every voice actor wants to be in a Pixar movie,” Vocino said. “I put it on my goal list every year, but you’re like, ‘No, it will never happen.’ But it did, and you just have to have some faith and trust that sometimes things can work out.”
Replacing the iconic Estelle Harris, who died in 2022, came with both pressure and honor, Vocino said.
“(Pixar tells) a story so well, and they are so good at making you cry at some point in the movie. This one is no different,” she said.
Vocino, an Emory University graduate, was among the eight co-founders of Whole World Improv Theatre in Atlanta in the 1990s.
After she and her husband moved to Los Angeles in 2001, her Atlanta talent agent suggested she send him recorded auditions from the West Coast. She booked Atlanta jobs remotely before eventually pursuing voiceover work full-time in Los Angeles.
Outside of acting, Vocino is the founder and CEO of Eat Happy Kitchen, where she shares gluten-free recipes and promotes healthy cooking. She has written several cookbooks, including “Eat Happy: Gluten Free, Grain Free, Low Carb Recipes Made from Real Foods for a Joyful Life” and “Eat Happy Italian.” Her newest cookbook, “Eat Happy Cocktail Hour,” will be published in October.
Vocino’s passion for food and cooking was shaped both by a diagnosis of celiac disease in 2002 and by growing up in food scarcity.
“I was raised by a single mom, and she had a lot of jobs and didn’t have time to make food. I would watch Julia Child on PBS when I was little,” Vocino recalled.
Her love of cooking was “literally driven from a place of being hungry,” she said. “I always wanted to be around food.”
She began working at catering companies as she grew older, Vocino explained.
Vocino’s decades of work have allowed her to build her Eat Happy brand and share it on segments of news and TV programs such as “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen.”
“I have been very lucky to be a journeyman actor, working for several decades, making money through the Screen Actors Guild and getting my insurance. That’s an incredible accomplishment,” she said. “That being said, you have a lot of downtime.”
Vocino spends her downtime focusing on Eat Happy.
“For me, I can make a really delicious dinner and invent a recipe and take a gorgeous photo of it and share it online,” she said. “Eat Happy Kitchen sprang out of all that.”
