D. C. Douglas is an American actor. He played Pa Kettle on Syfy's Z Nation and Zepht on Star Trek: Enterprise, and has appeared in several soap operas, including Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless. He voiced Albert Wesker in ten Resident Evil games, Legion in Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, and Yoshikage Kira in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable (2016).
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Early life
Douglas was born in Berkeley, California. His father worked in sales and his mother is an artist, writer, and spiritual advisor. His maternal grandparents were vaudeville performers. After the decline of Vaudeville, his grandmother, Grace Hathaway, performed in burlesque and his grandfather, Joe Miller, became known in San Francisco for his talks at the Theosophy Lodge and weekly group walks through Golden Gate Park.
His parents divorced when he was five and Douglas was primarily raised by his mother in the San Francisco Bay Area from the 1970s to early 1980s. At age seven, he decided to become an actor after watching an episode of Hollywood and the Stars. He performed in community theatre in San Jose and Walnut Creek, and after getting his GED his Ygnacio Valley High School drama teacher encouraged him to pursue his acting dream.
At sixteen, Douglas traveled alone to New York to audition for Royal Academy of Dramatic Art -- the only US held auditions that year -- but was not accepted. Though his back-up plan was to live in New York, his visit dissuaded him from that idea. Instead, he moved to Los Angeles in 1985.
Career
Live action
Douglas graduated from the Estelle Harman Actors Workshop, the only accredited acting trade school in Los Angeles at the time. He co-founded the improvisation troupe Section Eight and was a member of Theatre of NOTE for several years. He produced Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends (A Final Evening with the Illuminati) at the Hollywood United Methodist Church, performing as Brother Lawrence opposite Theatre of NOTE co-founder Kevin Carr in a benefit for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. The production was well received and became an LA Weekly "Pick-of-the-Week." Douglas performed in many other Equity Waiver 99-seat Theatre productions throughout the 1990s.
Douglas' first network TV role was on the ABC sitcom Coach, but his three lines were cut in the final broadcast. In 1996, he landed a small role in Boston Common, an NBC pilot. When the show was picked up, he returned in a recurring role as DC, the antagonist to Hedy Burress's character.
Douglas' television career involved primarily conservative or antagonist roles. Notable appearances include 24, Star Trek: Enterprise, NYPD Blue, ER, Charmed, Without a Trace, NCIS, Criminal Minds, Castle, and The Encounter.
In 2015, while pitching a film project to The Asylum that would pay homage to Resident Evil 5, a video game Douglas had worked on and gained fan appreciation for, the producers were inspired to cast him as Pa Kettle in Z Nation, a Syfy zombie series, for a three-episode arc.
Though never considered for a lead contract role on the Los Angeles-based soap operas, Douglas guest starred on all of them numerous times. Notable appearances include the manipulative Bellman in a 1991 Days of Our Lives honeymoon arc and two different characters on The Young and the Restless - Chad Atherton in a 1996 arc and Kurz, a crime boss taunting Tristan Rogers's character, in 2014. In 2017, Douglas made his 26th appearance on The Bold and the Beautiful over 20 years, playing his 6th role on the show.
In 2021, Douglas announced he was rebooting his acting career with a focus on independent cinema.
Douglas' first film was 1989's Future Force with David Carradine. Though all his scenes were with Carradine, Douglas never met him as their characters only spoke through a futuristic video conference system.
Voiceover
Douglas began his voice acting career in the early 1990s by providing walla for low budget action and erotic films that were usually aired late night on Showtime. By the 21st century he had stopped doing general walla work altogether, but occasionally took on unique ADR jobs, including voice matching Guy Pearce in Factory Girl and Kevin Spacey in Fred Clause, as well as voicing a TV reporter in 50/50 and Brad Pitt's SpaceCom computer therapist in Ad Astra.
Douglas has voiced a variety of characters in video games, often being cast as low-voiced villains. Notable roles include The Master in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer video game, Albert Wesker in the Resident Evil series as well as Marvel vs. Capcom (9 games in total from 2007 - 2019), Raven in Tekken 6, AWACS Ghost Eye in Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation, Commandant Alexei in Tales of Vesperia, Legion in Mass Effect 2/Mass Effect 3/Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Grimoire Noir and Pod 042 in the Nier franchise, Azrael in BlazBlue: Chrono Phantasma, Coburn in Ubisoft's The Crew and Hector Birtwhistle (H.B.) in Xenoblade Chronicles X.
Douglas was a CBS Daytime promo announcer for the summer of 2003. He has cited that job as the turning point in his voiceover career, as he used the money from that contract to build his home studio, which was uncommon for voice artists at the time. Having a home studio allowed him to leave his editing job and work solely as an actor.
Douglas has lent his voice to several national ad campaigns, including the GEICO Celebrity campaign from 2006 to 2008, the McDonald's Be the Sizzle campaign from 2009 to 2010, Radio Shack's Holiday Hero campaign in 2010 and several Experian spots featuring Douglas and Tom Kenny as computers in 2014.
He has been one of the promo voices for Sony Pix since 2018.
Douglas' work in animation includes the role of Chase in Hub Network's Transformers: Rescue Bots (the longest-running Transformers series), Colonel Rawls (and many others) in Cartoon Network's Regular Show, Sylvus (the Elder) and Aikor (the Villain) in Monchichi Tribe, Newton in The Rocketeer, and a cameo in Family Guy as Superman.
Douglas initially avoided anime work in the early 2000s due to the low pay rates at the time. However, during his first convention appearance in 2010, he saw the growing interest from anime fans in meeting voice actors. Douglas has said the opportunity to travel while getting paid inspired him to seek out work at the Los Angeles production houses that recorded anime. This led to fan favorite roles such as Yoshikage Kira in the Diamond Is Unbreakable arc of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Wooden Sword Ryu in Netflix's Shaman King, Edo in Netflix's Ultraman, Praetorian in Netflix's Super Crooks, and X Drake in One Piece. He replaced Troy Baker as the new voice of the character Gin in the English dub of Case Closed.
Politics
In April 2010, Douglas faced criticism from the Tea Party movement for a phone call he made to Freedomworks in which he left an inflammatory voice mail. A day later, GEICO removed him from a series of internet commercials that were in post-production. This led to some debate in the voice-over community about whether announcers were public figures. Douglas responded by producing a satirical Tea Party PSA for YouTube that was subsequently broadcast on both Joy Behar's HLN show and Geraldo Rivera's Geraldo at Large with Douglas as a guest.
The experience inspired Douglas to continue creating short, satirical political videos. Two of his most viewed videos were his Burn a Koran Day video (posted by The Huffington Post) and his Why #OccupyWallStreet? video (aired on MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell).
In November 2011, Douglas tweeted a quote from Brett Ratner at a Tower Heist Q&A that included a disparaging remark about homosexuals. The Hollywood Reporter subsequently reported Douglas' tweet as the beginning of a controversy which led to Ratner resigning from his role as producer of the 2012 Academy Awards.
