Daniel Stern is on an ABC Emmy-winning series, yet his name has never appeared in the show's credits and his biography is no where to be found in the network's press kit. As the adult voice of teenager Kevin Arnold (played by Fred Savage) on The Wonder Years (Wednesdays at 8 P.M. [ET]), Stern is the invisible man of prime-time television and he wouldn't have it any other way.
"It's the perfect incognito part," explains the 33-year-old actor, who
has credits in more than 20 feature films, including "Diner," "Blue Thunder"
and current comedy "Home Alone." "The main thing I do is movie acting.
I don't want people listening to me in my movies thinking about me in The
Wonder Years." Stern reasons that his anonymity is good for the show as
well because "people really think it's Kevin's brain or Kevin in the future
looking back." The grimmick is so
popular, other shows are parodying it. In an upcoming episode of The
Simpsons, for instance, viewers will hear the grown-up Bart Reminiscing
about his childhood. The voice: Daniel Stern's.
Actually, Stern's childhood was a lot closer to Kevin's than Bart's. "I was in choir, and I was with the kinds of guys who went toward rock 'n' roll," he recalls, "I was Everyman." Or, at least EveryKid, exhibiting the ususal garden-variety problems with "friends and cliques and egos-and especially girls." Stern, in fact, seems eerily connected to his character: "I feel like I am Kevin Arnold. In a way, Fred's my imagination, but try telling that to Fred."
Stern, who lives with his wife and three children near San Francisco,
spends about an hour and a half each week recording voice-overs for the
series. That's not always as easy as it sounds. Recently he was on location
in Santa Fe, N.M. for an upcoming movie, "City Slickers," when Wonder Years
executive producer Bob Brush called, asking him to narrate an episode.
Nowhere near a recording studio, Stern enlisted the film's sound engineer:
"He came over to a house I'm renting and set up a microphone, but he didn't
have a wind screen to block out the background noise." For a homemade remedy,
Stern reached deep into his dresser drawer. Now try to picture TV's invisible
man reciting The Wonder Years-into his socks.