If you own a television, chances are you’ve heard the sonorous voice that promos shows CSI Miami, Dateline NBC and The Wire. It belongs to Brad Abelle (pronounced “able”), voiceover artist extraordinaire.

Abelle has been in the business of “acting with your voice,” as he describes it, for 30 years. He was a theatre arts major at Drew, and while still a student, he got his first taste of acting with his voice working as a cub reporter at Morristown, N.J., radio station WMTR.

After a false start as a Xerox salesperson (“I had the gift of the gab, but hated the work”), Brad got a job at WPCH, an FM radio station in Atlanta, where he learned every aspect of the radio business, including how to voice commercials. “I cut my teeth there,” he says.

Today Abelle’s résumé reads like TV Guide: His credits include Friends, the reality series Ghost Hunters and Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance. He’s also segued into animation, voicing Goliath on the children’s TV series Davey and Goliath and creating original characterizations for Cartoon Network.

In recent years, Abelle, who lives with his wife and two children in Maplewood, N.J., has moved into an elite group of two dozen or so voiceover artists who do movie trailers for the big studios. His recent work includes Marley and Me, X-Files: The Movie and The Lives of Others, which won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

By Brooke Goode