Bugs Bunny Is 86. The Man Who Voiced Him for 15 Years Died at 46.

Eric Bauza, the Emmy-winning actor who spent 15 years as the voice of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck at Warner Bros. Animation, died on October 25, 2026, at the age of 46. ^[1][2]

His family announced the death in a statement shared on his Instagram account. They called him the modern voice of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, among many other cartoon characters, said he had passed away suddenly and promised more details to follow. ^[1] Los Angeles County Medical Examiner records cited by Variety list hypertensive cardiovascular disease as the cause. ^[1]

Twenty-three days before he died, Bauza gave an interview that now reads like a working manual for his craft.

Porky first, then Daffy

In an interview published on October 2 by the magazine SciFiNow, Bauza talked about promoting The Day the Earth Blew Up, the Looney Tunes feature in which he voiced both Porky Pig and Daffy Duck. ^[4] He did not talk about magic. He talked about logistics.

He recorded the two leads one at a time, he said, and always Porky first. ^[4] The reason was practical: Porky saves the voice, and Daffy spends it. Bauza said Daffy could go from 10 to 11, 12, sometimes 19, a scale that exists only in a booth and only for one duck. ^[4]

That is the sound of a working actor managing an instrument that has to be thrown at the wall for hours. It is also the best argument I know against calling what he did impersonation. An impressionist captures a sound. Bauza was budgeting a performance, like an athlete who knows when to sprint.

He described a method with plenty of room for doubt. A line that reads well on paper can change when spoken, he said, so he would change the delivery in the booth, perhaps going quiet where the script seemed to ask for a shout, and see whether it landed differently. ^[4] He called it trial and error, worked out with the directors and audio engineers. ^[4]

The quiet take matters. Daffy is the duck everyone remembers shouting, and a lazier performer would have shouted every time. Trying the line softer means playing the scene in front of you instead of the catchphrase behind it, and that is acting.

And before any of that came homework. Bauza said he watched the original Looney Tunes shorts to study the characters. ^[4]

A rabbit with a birth date

The Hollywood Reporter identifies A Wild Hare, released in 1940, as the first official Bugs Bunny cartoon. ^[5] The rabbit is 86 years old. Most things that age are in a museum, a cemetery or a textbook. Bugs is in a studio, still being written new scenes.

That is the real problem of an inherited cartoon voice. The audience carries a memory of the character, and memory is not a recording. It is softer, and it is kept alive by habit. A new actor who matches the old sound exactly, and nothing else, would produce a wax figure. One who ignores it would produce a stranger. The job lies between those, and it asks for what Bauza described: knowing why a line was funny in the first place, then finding the version of it that is funny now.

I think that is why audiences took his Bugs and Daffy as the real thing. They were not hearing a copy. They were hearing a character who still reacted, still hit the beat a half-second before you expected it, and still sounded like himself in a scene that had never existed before.

Bauza said he had loved Bugs Bunny since childhood, and that Bugs and Daffy were probably his favourite voices to perform. People, he said, tended to favour his Daffy. ^[4]

Four hundred credits and a character designer's eye

Variety counts more than 400 acting credits, starting with The Ripping Friends in 2001. ^[1] Bugs was already 61 by then. The list runs through Avatar: The Last Airbender, Chowder, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated and Space Jam: A New Legacy. ^[1] He began his animation career as a character designer at a Hollywood production studio before moving into voice acting. ^[1]

That order of events is worth pausing on. Someone who first learned to draw how a character stands, leans and sells a joke with a silhouette might reasonably go on to hear a voice the same way, as a body in motion rather than a sound.

The industry noticed. According to Variety, Bauza won three Children's & Family Emmy Awards, for Teen Titans Go!, Bugs Bunny Builders and Looney Tunes Cartoons, and had five Daytime Emmy nominations. ^[1] Two of the three winning titles carry the rabbit's name or the franchise's. The old characters were being rewarded in new shows, which is exactly what inheriting them is supposed to look like.

His Looney Tunes work was not limited to the two stars. A review of this summer's Coyote vs. Acme noted that he also voiced Porky, Pepé Le Pew and Foghorn Leghorn in the film. ^[3] The reviewer said Bugs, Daffy and Tweety were important to its story, and that Bauza's voices helped connect the film to Looney Tunes' legacy. ^[3] The characters were in the plot, not parked in cameos.

On The Day the Earth Blew Up, Variety's Peter Debruge called him a "vocal MVP" and praised the "manic energy" he brought to Porky and Daffy. ^[1] Manic is a fair word for Daffy. It is a less obvious word for the actor who has to schedule that mania so he still has a voice at the end of the session.

What the studio said, and what is unfinished

Channing Dungey, chairman of the Warner Bros. Television Group and US Networks, said Bauza had been the voice of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck during his 15 years at Warner Bros. Animation. ^[1][2] She said that carrying on the Looney Tunes legacy was one of his greatest honors. ^[1][2] Fifteen years is about a sixth of the rabbit's life, a long stretch for one actor to hold a character that has outlasted every studio chief who ever signed off on him.

He died with work in front of him. Variety reports he was in pre-production on Bye Bye Bunny: A Looney Tunes Musical, in which he was to voice Daffy Duck, and on The Dragon Masters, in which he was to voice the Shogun King. ^[1] Nothing has been announced about either project, and Warner Bros. has not said how the Bugs and Daffy roles will be handled in future work. The family has not yet shared further details about his death or any memorial arrangements.

Those are questions for the studio, and they will arrive soon enough. Looney Tunes has outlived its first generation of voices and its first generation of audiences, and it will find another actor. What is harder to replace is the thing Bauza spelled out in his last interview, which is the knowledge of how the work is done: which character to record first, when to go quiet, how a duck's volume is rationed.

He talked about a Daffy who could go to 19. Anyone who has heard that duck lose his temper knows exactly what that sounds like, and now knows what it cost to produce.