Alfred Munyua on Directing That ‘Big Mouth’ Kenya Episode and How It All Came to Be

I can bet my right arm that you didn’t know that Alfred Munyua, best known for his roles in the police procedural Crime and Justice and comedy Mother-in-Law, is also a director. Perhaps it’s because, like me, you haven’t been paying attention, or Munyua has just been too good at keeping it lowkey. “I think I had a fear of coming out,” he tells me. The actor has been slowly (and silently) building his portfolio as a movies and series director and, most notably, as a casting and voice director in various projects with Hiventy Africa, a dubbing and subtitling company with offices in Nairobi, Lagos and Casablanca.

I met Munyua for the first time on the set of Crime and Justice season one in 2021. Eager, charming and in a drab detective jacket, he had just stepped into his role as the indifferent and pragmatic Detective Silas, the other half of the elite Nairobi Metropol Police crime-fighting duo that would usher in Showmax’s first-ever original in Kenya. It was a big year for Munyua, even more so because he was also just starting another exciting journey, one that would put him directly on the path to cast and direct a segment of Netflix’s adult animated series Big Mouth two years later.

When the seventh season of Big Mouth premiered in October 2023, Kenya and other countries like India and Brazil were featured in a special international episode (episode 6) that looked at how kids around the world experience puberty. The Kenya segment, directed by Munyua, who was also the casting director, was voiced by Kenyan actors Nyokabi Macharia, Nice Githinji, Makovo Mbatha and Boniface Muthoka, alongside Academy winner Lupita Nyong’o as Asha the Shame Wizard and Don Cheadle as himself.

Even though only less than five minutes, this segment is as much an industry highlight of 2023 as it is Munyua’s biggest moment of the year, perhaps even his most defining one yet as a director and casting director. “I was really honoured, especially after just a few minutes in the studio with the actors when we kicked off the project, and they were like ‘Alfie, you seem to know what you’re doing, so we’ll just sit back, watch you do your thing and ask any questions if we have any.’ And amazingly, they were quiet the whole session,” Munyua marvels. “I was happy that I had done my job perfectly, and that felt good.”

His involvement with Big Mouth started with The Upshaws, another Netflix project, in 2021, the same year Crime and Justice premiered. “My first engagement with Hiventy was when the company was dubbing Netflix’s comedy series The Upshaws to Swahili. I was voicing the role of Mike Epps, one of the show’s main stars,” Munyua says. Working with Hiventy on this project, and many more that would come, Munyua got to really explore his passion for voice acting, voice directing and casting. “Eventually, Netflix came calling with this Big Mouth project, and that’s how I got into the whole mix as a casting director and voice director.”

And to think that he wasn’t even a fan of Big Mouth before he got involved in the project; in fact, Munyua had never watched an episode of the raunchy animated series. He only watched a few episodes a few days before hitting the studios for research and to understand the magnitude of what he was about to embark on.

The project might have appeared a bit overwhelming, intimidating even, in someone else’s hand. After all, Big Mouth is Netflix’s longest-running scripted original series and one of the streamer’s most successful series. But for Munyua, it was “easy throughout the whole process.” “I doubt I’ve ever been intimidated by any project,” he says. “Of course, there’s the usual jitters because we usually have some fear for anything new or any change out of your normal lane. It’s work, and it’s art, and I really appreciate art, and I just embrace it because when you start being intimidated, you might not do as much as you should have.”

You can tell that he’s been waiting for a project like this, one that would validate his skills as a director and casting director in such a huge way, and on a global platform like Netflix. From the casting stage, Munyua had an idea of the kind of people who would nail the roles the project required. “When I replayed the voices from the original Big Mouth material which was in English, I could picture the perfect Kenyan actors to play the parts.” Munyua tells me he doesn’t like open calls for his auditions. “I don’t want to waste people’s time (or money), so I always narrow down to who I think would best fit the role.” Of course, if his cast of choice doesn’t fit the client’s expectations, he has to widen his net. If that still doesn’t work, he usually has no choice but to go for open calls. “Generally, for such projects (like Big Mouth), I tend to lean towards already established acts rather than novice actors whom I probably would have to first train before we embark on the project. There was really no time for training in a project like this with a quick turnaround,” he says.

Of the eight voices he sent to Netflix and Big Mouth’s team, only four (Githinji, Macharia, Mbatha, and Muthoka) were picked for all the parts that some had to voice more than one character. “These actors stood out because of their talent,” Munyua raves about his cast. “Their versatility worked because they could voice two different roles, and you couldn’t even tell they’re the same person. Versatility in voice is very rare.”

During rehearsals, Munyua and his cast reworked the language in the original material supplied by the Big Mouth team, just enough to make it more Kenyan. “They had done their own version of the sheng (or Kenyanese as they call it), but we picked up some stuff that needed to be changed where we felt that Kenyans don’t really speak like that. So we changed a lot in their sheng/Swanglish version, working with the actors for them to relate better with their lines.”

Everything was flawless once the cast stepped into the studio for the recording with Munyua as the director, a technician, an in-house producer from Hiventy and the Big Mouth team who joined virtually from the USA. “We had almost 8 hours in the studio but finished recording in only two hours, for all the actors. I tore them apart, of course, because I had to get what I wanted, from mood, poise and line delivery to complement the picture. We had to give the Big Mouth team many variations to work with, and the actors delivered. I would work with them again any time,” Munyua says.

From the release of Disney+’s short film animated anthology Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire to Netflix’s first African animated series Supa Team 4 to Showmax’s first 2D animation Twende, 2023 has been described as a breakthrough year for animation in Africa. And even though Big Mouth is not an African series, Munyua is right in the middle of the revolution, having also cast and directed Kenyan animated sci-fi The Mysteries of Jabali and Sauti for Kenyan-owned Akili Kids. He can only hope ‘this revolution’ will open up Kenya and the rest of the continent to more opportunities. “It’s a beautiful thing to see because it opens up another realm of work, another whole perspective of how art is produced and performed,” Munyua says. “I’m hoping that whatever we’ve done is good enough for potential clients to see some light on our side and choose to invest more here, for us to have the opportunity to voice, direct and interact, and to learn from them so that they can also learn from us.”