Who better to voice a superhuman wielder of weather than a Caribbean woman who has known hurricanes? Storm — Ororo Munroe, veteran member of the X-Men — has long been an iconic figure in comic book, animation, and live-action media. A proud African royal, with a halo of white hair framing her resolute features, forked lightning descending from her fingertips, a commanding voice that splits the heavens themselves — Storm is a household name the world over.
What ties her, then, to her best-known, most-credited voice actress: a woman who began life as a Barbadian girl of the 1960s, her head teeming with stories and fables? At just eight years old, Alison Sealy-Smith had become aware of her own power: the ability to live within worlds of her own invention, and to draw rapt observers into those realms.
Her early years as a student at the Ursuline Convent School in Barbados were typified by this storytelling. Sealy-Smith held fellow youths and adults alike in her thrall, weaving Anansi-esque her gleeful, weird tales.
“Weird” should not be thought of as a derogatory description, she says, her tone wry and twinkling. “That ability to travel inside of my head, to embrace some of the weirdness that was going on without thinking of myself as weird,” she notes, “is definitely foundational to everything that I have done since then.”
When Sealy-Smith emigrated to Canada and immersed herself in a working actor’s life on stage and in screen parts, the concept of a psionic, elemental super-goddess being at the top of her CV was beyond even her wildest imaginings. She remembers some bewilderment when her agent put her up for the audition. Comic books, she thought?
“Fighting for good, for those of us who are weaker than ourselves: I didn’t have to dig deep for that”
When Sealy-Smith walked into the casting room, she was surrounded by formidable actresses; swiftly, she began to discern the significance of the part, and what it would mean to earn it. She knew instinctively that a formulaic or generic African continent accent would ill-serve the role, and leaned instead into the character’s innate gravitas.
Palpable presence, after all, was something with which she was familiar, having trod the boards in stage productions on either side of the Atlantic. She focused on the script in her hands. She opened her mouth, and the rest is living, soaring history.
In the 1990s, she embodied Storm, poised behind a lone mic in a recording booth, a director behind a glass pane, and a script perched upon a music stand, with no co-stars, no studio executives — just the actress and her director, working to create a legend in pitch and timbre, intonation and pacing.
Situated leagues away geographically from her fellow actors, this setup was as confronting as it was expedient, prompting a new way of working that pushed Sealy-Smith to her creative boundaries. “I had to learn to work with nothing but the inside of my head, listening to instincts, listening to what I understand about storytelling.” Script, directorial guidance, and intuition: these were her Storm-building trinity.
Ask any X-Men fan — be they a meticulous comic book obsessive, a faithful watcher of X-Men: The Animated Series (1993–97), a new devotee of the X-Men ‘97 revival show, or all of the above: Storm is never far from galvanic praise. Introduced to the Marvel Comics world in 1975, she is one of the first Black superheroes in mainstream comic books, and has proven to be wildly popular since her initial airing as an ensemble cast member.
A fiercely committed leader, an ardent champion of the undefended, Ororo Munroe transformed comic book and later animation history. Little girls, glued to their television screens with whole galaxies in their eyes — listening to Storm declaim in a thunderous boom that justice would be done — have since grown up to be women wielding their power on stages of their own choosing.
What this has meant to Sealy-Smith is often, by her own admission, unfathomable in its scope and grandeur. But extraordinary gratitude resides at the heart of her feeling. She, too, has loved Storm for decades.
“This feeling of what it is like to be powerful and vulnerable at the same time,” she says, remains at the root of her lifelong journey with Ororo Munroe, a sage priestess who battles debilitating claustrophobia even while marshalling her fellow X-Men mid-fight. “Fighting for good, for those of us who are weaker than ourselves: I didn’t have to dig deep for that. Most of my early on the job training was about issue-oriented theatre. I did anti-racism work, anti-poverty, anti-homelessness, anti-homophobia … that was my training ground.”
Listening to Sealy-Smith imbue visceral emotion in so many of Storm’s memorable speeches, this isn’t hard to believe. You might reasonably conclude that if Ororo Munroe could have met the woman who’s primarily voiced her, she’d approve, with peals of echoing applause.
It’s no surprise, then, that X-Men ’97 — the 2024 Disney Plus series which picks up immediately following the concluding events of X-Men: The Animated Series — was released to uproarious acclaim. A second season has already been greenlit.
“I know where I am. I know this woman. I know her rage at the injustices of this world. I know her in a different way than I did in my 30s”
A groundswell of feeling gripped Sealy-Smith when she realised, approaching the recording studio to voice Storm anew, that it was in fact the very same studio in which she’d first laid her invocatory lines down as the character, a quarter of a century ago. Her voice resounded in the booth with Storm’s opening exclamation in the new series: “I am Storm, Mistress of the Elements! Release that boy or face my fury!”
The whoop of exultation Sealy-Smith releases recounting this is effervescent, crackling with an irrepressible happiness, borne of finding herself at the crossroads of intuition, skill, affinity, and passion: “I know where I am. I know this woman. I know her rage at the injustices of this world. I know her in a different way than I did in my 30s.”
Alongside this, Sealy-Smith is open to discovering a swathe of new revelations about this personage she’s inhabited in and out of decades. No-one, after all, can be infinitely known — least of all a sovereign, airborne defender of the skies and seas.
Storm’s capacity to thrill and subvert the expectations of audiences who might think they know her continues in X-Men ‘97. She’s been augmented rather than redrawn, with noticeably darker skin and a slick, shaved-head coiffure — a design that doubles as a faithful callback to elements of her look in the 1980s comic book version of her character.
For her appearance in the third season of Marvel’s What If…? series, her character is armour-bedecked, gleaming and formidable — her eyes aglow with potency. Sealy-Smith loves these visual evolutions, which mirror Storm’s desire to face a new era with reinvigorated zeal for life, and celebrate her standing confidently in her own body.
Fandom appreciation has always been intense, and now it’s more immediate than ever. Sealy-Smith, in photographs shared on her official Instagram account, is oft-surrounded by Storm cosplayers adorned in intricate, detail-accurate costumes — their hair sprayed or braided into glowing white coronas and ice-sharp mohawks.
The looks on their faces tell their own story. These are people of all ages and backgrounds, united by the unmistakable love of meeting one of their absolute heroes in the flesh.
“The decibel level,” Sealy-Smith says as she describes fan-centric engagement and rapport, “is higher than it’s ever been.” To stay attentive to the stories her convention-attending and forum-writing followers bring to her takes a certain kind of empathetic stamina — a willingness to hear narratives that are often as vulnerable as they are steeped in teary thankfulness.
Alison Sealy-Smith is nothing if not a good listener. She knows, too, the value of absorbing opinions, critiques, analyses — how both to hold them with care, and how to assign them their separate rooms, so she can get on with the business of voicing one of the world’s most marvellous Black women.
Through all this, Barbados has remained her fixed, unwavering point of origin. “I go home,” she says, simply and with a lightning bolt of the gravitas that becomes her so well. “I have always been going home.”
She lived in Barbados again, full-time, from 2009 to 2020. Her memories of those 11 years reign, alive, in her sense of herself as a Caribbean woman — imbued with her own larger-than-life power. Storm wasn’t the character she was best known for, she reflects, when she was spotted in grocery stores on the island; home-soil fans were quicker to celebrate her live-action television roles.
But today, unmistakably, the Caribbean children who sat — cross-legged and starry-eyed before their parents’ television sets, soaking up the resonance and passion of Alison Sealy-Smith’s voice — are all grown up now. She is, indisputably, their queen.