On his way to host a major listening party in Lagos, Deji Osikoya received the kind of news that makes any host’s blood run cold: the headline artist had lost his voice. The jokes he had planned? The crowd banter? All of it, gone. For most, this would be a nightmare.
For Osikoya, a man who has built a career on pivoting between the roles of voice actor, comedian, marketer, and podcaster, it was just another Tuesday. “I had to freestyle, man,” he recalls with a laugh, the memory still vivid. “All the questions I had planned… I couldn’t do them anymore. I just had to find a way to interact with the crowd.”
It’s this chameleonic ability to adapt, to find the connective tissue between seemingly disparate skills, that has made Deji Osikoya one of Nigeria’s most compelling creative forces.
Deji Osikoya loves to yap. This might seem redundant to say, as all his career paths involve talking, but Deji Osikoya really, really likes to talk. There are many places to hear Deji Osikoya’s voice, even if you’ve never met him. You might hear him in an Airtel ad, on the radio, or see him on YouTube in a series.
For some people, Deji does a lot, but he doesn’t see it that way. “If you really think about it, everything I do involves talking, so I rarely see it as very different paths, just something I switch to on the given day.”
His undying love for talking and his ability to do so in an attention-grabbing fashion have led Deji to have his fingers in many pies. But it wasn’t always so. In 2022, Deji worked as a communications and marketing specialist, but he knew he wanted to do something more, so he put out a video on Instagram talking about his voiceover dreams, which in turn kick-started his career.
“The reception was crazy. I didn’t expect that at all. That video got me an acting gig,” he said, referring to his role on NdaniTV’s Skinny Girl in Transit as Dr Elijah. From then on, Deji’s career became one for the books, leading him to quit his day job.
“I mean, I knew what I was going to do next – I had savings that were geared to last me a while, I had a roof over my head, and I could still maintain, to an extent, my lifestyle. I wouldn’t say it was a drastic change. I was just really excited about what all this free time meant for me. I just let life happen, you know, I didn’t do too much. I was doing like voiceovers and things in the interim, but honestly? I just chilled.”
In that space of freedom, he found something unexpected in the mirror: courage. “I think it taught me that I’m definitely more courageous than I would give myself credit for,” he explains. “It really taught me a valuable lesson about how you can find the courage after you do the thing, as opposed to finding it before. You can do the thing, and the courage shows up after.”
It’s a resilience he didn’t know he possessed. “I wouldn’t have described myself as that prior. I thought I was a lot softer, but when your back is against the wall, you find out some things about yourself.”
As he made his self-discoveries, Deji also made strides in all his career paths. With progress comes the work of staying relevant. Many will view virality as a key ingredient to achieving that, but Deji Osikoya quickly shrugged off the pressure that plagues most. “Initially, I had the pressure that came with trying to make the next viral video, but then I thought about it – did I want to reach people or did I want a thousand likes? I think ultimately I don’t really feel that pressure anymore. The pressure now is to get myself to create.”
He does admit that virality does have its perks, though. “A voiceover video that I did, it was like a rendition of something Idris Elba had done. It got Idris Elba to send me a comment on my page, and yeah, like he commented on me with a couple of fist bumps because I was doing his thing, and I shouted him out, and I don’t know how he saw it till tomorrow.”
Outside of voice acting, Deji hosts an Afrobeats-centered podcast, “With an S. I like to nerd out, especially about music. We talked about the Escalidizzy II on the pod, and doing things like that, interviewing artists, talking about the music.”
When it comes to his craft, he demystifies the process. Voice acting isn’t about a nice voice; it’s gruelling work. “It’s a very fluid process, it’s not very straightforward,” he says of getting into character. The key is patience and checking your ego at the door. “You have to be patient enough to allow yourself to sit there and fail and get it back and fail and be coachable.”
This was a lesson reinforced on set for Skinny Girl in Transit, where a director told him to slow down his speech. “I know you think you slowed down,” she told him after a take, “but I need you to slow down a thousand times more.”
The director’s simple yet powerful words on that set translated to more than an acting tip for him. It became a mantra that has guided him to do and be better as he applied it across his life. “Slow down. Slow down, slow down. That’s it. Before you take offense, slow down. Before you say yes, slow down. Before you agree to this, slow down.”
So, what are the best and worst parts of being Deji Osikoya today?
The best part is profound in its simplicity: “Being favoured by God. Being able to live off the things that I actually dreamed about. I get to tell my story. I’m not sitting in an office hating my life. I have the opportunity to really do things for my inner child; I think he would be really proud of me.”
The worst part is equally candid. First, he has his off days. “Deji Osikoya can be lazy. He has days where he’s just like, ‘I just don’t wanna do this.’” Second, he is his own harshest critic. “He can be very hard on himself…I need to look from the outside in to see that I’m doing a decent job.” To combat this, he keeps a win journal, a practice he felt compelled to start, where he records everything from landing a voiceover to simply feeling good about himself.
Lastly, he struggles with keeping up with people. “My ability to follow through on the connections that come to me… I could definitely do better.” He’s in awe of people who can maintain vast, meaningful networks and feels a responsibility to the gravity that pulls people into his orbit.
Where does the chameleon see himself in a year? He has goals, but he holds them loosely. “I have no clue,” he says, his faith foregrounding his ambition. “There’s no way to know… I pray for the best, and I write down things. I try and have goals, but ultimately, I know that His path supersedes whatever path I have for myself.”
It’s this quiet acceptance that defines him. Deji Osikoya is doing many things authentically and all of them at once, while finding the courage not before the leap, but in the freefall itself.
