Rugrats Star E.G. Daily on Getting Big Break with Nickelodeon Series

Posted in: Nickelodeon, TV | Tagged: rugrats

Rugrats Star E.G. Daily on Getting Big Break with Nickelodeon Series

E.G. Daily reflects on being cast as Tommy Pickles in Rugrats and how the Nickelodeon animated series opened doors for her into voice acting.

Published Tue, 22 Sep 2026 16:37:08 -0500
by Tom Chang
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Article Summary

• E.G. Daily says landing Tommy Pickles on Rugrats in 1991 became the breakthrough that launched her voice acting career.
• The Rugrats star recalls auditioning cold, studying the character fast, and realizing Tommy matched a voice she knew well.
• Daily reveals she re-looped an entire Rugrats season, using her singer’s ear to quickly mirror the original dialogue.
• She says Rugrats success grew slowly, from early Nicktoons days to Emmys, more seasons, feature films, and a lasting legacy.

When Elizabeth Daily, also known professionally as E.G. Daily, was cast as the infant Tommy Pickles in the Nickelodeon animated series Rugrats in 1991, she had no idea how much it would set up her career in voice acting. Not only would she appear in all 172 episodes across all nine seasons from 1991 to 2004, but she would also reprise the role for the three films The Rugrats Movie (1998), Rugrats in Paris: The Movie (2000), and The Wild Thornberrys crossover Rugrats God Wild (2003), as well as the sequel series All Grown Up! (2003-2008) and the 2021 Rugrats reboot series for Paramount+/Nicktoons/Nickelodeon Global. The series follows Tommy and his friends as they live and communicate in their world, while the adult parents who care for them, with a distinct communication barrier, live in theirs. Daily spoke with PEOPLE about how she landed the role of Tommy and how her life has changed since.

Rugrats Star E.G. Daily on How the Series Shaped Her Life and Legacy

"I was doing the musical because I just missed having a band, and I didn't have a band at that time," Daily said. "So I was like, 'I'll do this musical that was offered to me,' that actually was on Broadway and starred Deborah Harry (of Blondie). And then it folded on Broadway, and they shipped this up to L.A., and they cast me in this play at the Roxy, and then I ended up getting a major record deal from this play, ['Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap'], and then I also got an agent who worked with me and said, 'You should do voice work. You're really good with your voice.'"

Daily's done her share of screen work in film and TV, with early appearances on Laverne & Shirley, The Righteous Apples, CHiPs, Fame, Valley Girl (1983), Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985), and Dutch (1991), embracing her new opportunity behind the mic. "I'd only done lots of movies and TV, but I didn't know the whole framework of cartoons," she shares. "And I wasn't one of those people that did cosplay or went to Comic-Cons back then. I went on this audition, and I was the first person in that room. And they said, 'We need to replace someone that's on this series. And we were looking for a different voice.' So I went in, I looked at the claymation. I saw the little character. And I was like, 'Huh, I think I could do that voice. That sounds like a voice I've been doing since I was a little girl."

Her big break with the Arlene Klasky, Gábor Csupó, and Paul Germain-created series came as part of the famed Nicktoons block, when Rugrats premiered alongside Doug and Ren & Stimpy in 1991. "I had no idea what I was getting myself into. And my agent called back and said, 'You did really well, and they booked you,' " she remembers. "I had to go back in when they cast me and redo all the voice for an entire season that another person had done. So I had to actually re-loop all of her lines in. And the beautiful thing was that because I'm a singer, I would just say, 'Oh, okay. No problem. Send me the tracks of her dialogue.' I would listen, and I just started to play with the melodies of how that person did the line. So I was able to loop an entire series, an entire season, really rapidly because the musical sense of my ear was like, 'I'll just listen to it and learn it like a song.'"

About the series success, "None of us expected it. None of us expected any of it," Daily said. "We kind of went in just very blind. And after a while, a few years, then it was like, 'Oh, we won an Emmy.' And we'd all be super grateful. Like, 'Oh, that's so beautiful.' And then the next thing it's like, 'Oh, they're picking up another season.' 'Oh, wonderful.' 'Oh, now they want to do a feature film.' So it was kind of like a slow burn of success. Nobody was overwhelmed by it." For more on how Daily expanded her work in voiceover and how she bonded with her castmates, you can check out the whole interview. The original Rugrats, which also features the voices of Christine Cavanaugh, Nancy Cartwright, Kath Soucie, Melanie Chartoff, Cheryl Chase, Jack Riley, Michael Bell, Tara Strong, Tress MacNeille, David Doyle, and Joe Alaskey, is available on Paramount+.

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