Eric Bauza, the voice actor who became the modern voice of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, has died at 46. His family announced on Sunday, October 25, that he had "passed away suddenly", describing him as an "Emmy Award-winning voice actor and the modern voice of iconic Looney Tunes characters." His manager, Judy Coppage, called him "a unique and versatile voice actor who was loved by everyone he knew and worked with." According to CBS Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner listed the cause as hypertensive cardiovascular disease.

For most of the twentieth century, the Looney Tunes had essentially one voice: Mel Blanc, who originated Bugs, Daffy, Porky and most of the Warner Bros. menagerie. After Blanc's death in 1989, the characters were divided among a series of gifted successors. Bauza became something rarer: a performer who once again carried nearly the whole cast. At his death his Looney Tunes roles included Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety, Marvin the Martian, Elmer Fudd, Foghorn Leghorn, Pepé Le Pew and the Road Runner. The Hollywood Reporter, naming him to its 2026 Animation Power List, said he had quietly become "the voice of an entire cartoon universe."

From Scarborough to Burbank

Bauza was born on December 7, 1979, in Scarborough, Ontario, and grew up, as he told it, on Saturday-morning reruns of the same cartoons he would later voice. He spent two decades as one of animation's most dependable character actors before the Looney Tunes made him a household voice. His more than 400 credits include Stimpy in the Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon", Puss in DreamWorks' The Adventures of Puss in Boots, Baby Fozzie in Muppet Babies, Dr. Psychobos in Ben 10: Omniverse, recurring roles in Bob's Burgers and Teen Titans Go!, and Woody Woodpecker in Universal's 2017 film and the animated series that followed. In games he voiced Rash in Battletoads (2020) and the Looney Tunes in MultiVersus.

His way into Warner Bros. was through Marvin the Martian, his first Looney Tunes role, in The Looney Tunes Show (2011). From there the parts multiplied: New Looney Tunes, then Looney Tunes Cartoons (2020), the slapstick revival that returned the characters to short, anarchic, hand-crafted gags. By then Bauza was voicing both Bugs and Daffy, the central double act of the whole franchise and the pairing Blanc himself had defined. He also voiced Looney Tunes in Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021), and Buster Bunny in Tiny Toons Looniversity.

Two Voices, One Rivalry

The difficulty of what Bauza did is easy to underestimate. Bugs and Daffy are not just two characters; they are opposites designed to play off each other. Bugs is the calm one who is always in control, and Daffy is the one whose ego is always one step from collapse. Doing both means arguing with yourself and making each side sound like it is winning. Bauza said Bugs was his favourite to voice, but admitted that as he got older he felt more like Daffy. It is a perfect summary of the job: to love the winner and to understand the loser.

The industry recognised it. He won three Children's & Family Emmys, beginning in 2022 with the first award ever given for Outstanding Voice Performance in an Animated Program, for Looney Tunes Cartoons, and followed it with wins for Bugs Bunny Builders and Teen Titans Go!. Before that he had collected five Daytime Emmy nominations.

One of His Last Roles

Among his final performances was Coyote vs. Acme, the live-action and animation hybrid that Warner Bros. completed and then shelved, before Ketchup Entertainment rescued it and released it this year. As we wrote when the film's survival was still in doubt, it became a symbol of how studios treat finished work as an asset to be written off. Bauza voiced around a dozen characters in it. That his last major Looney Tunes performance came in a film that almost never reached audiences is a bitter irony; that it did reach them is a small mercy.

Voice actors are among the least visible people in entertainment, and the best of them are the most invisible of all, because their work disappears into the characters. That is the paradox of Eric Bauza's career. Millions of children who grew up in the 2010s and 2020s heard him every week and never knew his name, which is exactly what he would have wanted. "What's up, Doc?" simply sounded, to them, like Bugs Bunny. For a generation, that was Bauza's achievement, and in his profession there is no higher compliment.

He was 46.