Instead, he has a small zendo on his farm in Sebastopol, California, where he occasionally visits with a handful of fellow students from time to time as what he calls a “dharma friend,” eschewing the title of teacher. Now, Coyote considers his sangha to be “wherever I’m sitting.” When he was ordained, he promised himself he wouldn’t teach formally for five years. He received transmission from Lew Richmond, who at the time had been his teacher for twelve years and was leading the Vimala Zen Center Sangha in Mill Valley, California. Actor Peter Coyote has been studying Buddhism for forty-five years and became a Zen priest in 2016. It isn’t your imagination: The guy who has been narrating Burns’ works for the past decade-plus is as Zen as his voice sounds. “And nobody does it better.” Often, Burns says, he ends up using Coyote’s very first, cold take. “We’re interested in one thing: our narrator’s ability to inhabit the words,” he explains to me. “Well,” Coyote said, “you don’t know how good I am.”īurns soon learned that was true. “No, I just read it when I get in the studio.” “So you can read and make your notes,” Burns countered in his own nasal twang. “What is all that?” Coyote said in his distinctive, gravelly voice. This was Burns’ and Coyote’s first direct experience with each other.īurns came with a pile of ten scripts, six yellow legal pads, a stack of DVDs, highlighters, and pencils.
#Peter coyote voice series
The two had both worked on another project, the 1996 series The West, which Burns had executive produced, but Stephen Ives had directed. The occasion was the 2009 series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. This approach didn’t go over well when Coyote, an actor, writer, and Zen teacher, first met with Burns, the filmmaker behind PBS’s signature documentaries. But Coyote shows up fresh every time, ready to read the words like he’s never read them before-because he hasn’t. This adds up to dozens of hours of words to impart. He has narrated eight of Ken Burns’ famously epic documentaries, including The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, The Vietnam War, and Country Music.
Peter Coyote doesn’t read the scripts in advance.
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