At 15, Azaria says, “I so desperately wanted to be anybody but myself.” Amir Hamja for The Washington Post

NEW YORK — Man, the things men do to avoid thinking about mortality. Buy a sports car. Or have an affair. Or get into deadlifts. Or become Bruce Springsteen.

Hank Azaria chose the last one. The actor has spent decades slipping in and out of the skins and voices of others, onstage and screen since 1987 — most notably through his dozens of characters on “The Simpsons” over the past 36 years.

So why not slip into yet another? Why not reach back to the voice of his youth? And why not do it on the very occasion of his getting older?

Azaria invited about 550 people to his 60th birthday party last April at Manhattan’s City Winery to watch him perform a blend of cosplay and karaoke. He assembled a band with the help of his son’s jazz piano teacher. For months, he recorded and rerecorded his own voice, playing it back, adjusting. Add more gravel. Bring the pitch up.

The goof grew serious. Azaria hired a vocal coach to help him hit Springsteen’s register. He over-practiced and blew out his voice. He greeted the day of his party by vomiting from nerves and taking cortisone to tame his inflamed throat.

The party went so well that Azaria is taking the show on the road, with his EZ Street Band. They practice like any touring act, spending hours perfecting three-minute versions of “Glory Days” and “Badlands” ahead of concerts this week in Alexandria and Baltimore.

During shows, Azaria tees up songs with stories about his own life — in Springsteen’s voice. Into “She’s the One,” he talks about meeting his wife of 18 years, former actress Katie Wright. Into “Thunder Road,” he remembers his dad teaching him to bowl, a rare memory of a distant man who usually told young Azaria to “Turn down that Bruce Springstreet.”

“Singing as Bruce is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” Azaria says on a frigid day in late February, in the green room of the Brooklyn Bowl, in between rehearsals. But the effort to become someone else has, as usual, paid dividends. “Now, I can sing much better as Bruce than I can as myself.”

During a rehearsal, in Springsteen’s booming rasp, Azaria sings: “I check my look in the mirror. Wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face!”

It’s a wish we’ve all had.

Thing is, Azaria actually can do it.

That wasn’t always a good thing.

Close your eyes and you just might find yourself thinking you’re at a 1983 Bruce Springsteen concert. Amir Hamja for The Washington Post

Azaria’s talent allowed him to ignore some eternal questions in his youth: What makes you you? Is it your mannerisms? The way you talk? Is it internal (what you think) or external (what others see)?

Mimicry came as naturally to him as speaking. “You either have a plastic voice box or you don’t,” he says, likening the trait to a genetic tic like being double-jointed.

He grew up in a loving but lonely home in Queens, with busy parents who used the TV — he had one in his bedroom — as surrogate child care. He’d spend hours parked in front of the flickering screen, absorbing whatever danced across it.

“Whatever came through that television, I promise you, I was paying attention to — and mimicking,” he says. What came through was pure Americana of the 1970s: baseball, Johnny Carson, sitcoms. “I basically am spinning back television and film from the 1970s,” he says, in his “Simpsons” characters, his Springsteen project, his half-hour show “Brockmire,” about a baseball announcer which ran four seasons on IFC.

Azaria also became a Zelig among his peers. Every social group has a secret language beyond words, and he would pick up all the right tics. And, in Queens, where every corner buzzed with a different accent — the tough kids, the burnouts, the jocks, the nerds — there were a lot of tics.

“I was a chameleon,” he says.

This superpower afforded him what every teenager seeks: instant universal acceptance. The cost was his own sense of self.

He didn’t know why, but his skin felt like someone else’s clothing, and he wanted to be anyone but himself. And his plastic voice allowed him to be.

Around 15 years old, “I got very confused and worried that I was crazy,” Azaria says. “I didn’t know which one was the real me.”

And he would do anything to distract from that burning question: Who is Hank Azaria?

Hank Azaria sits in the Brooklyn Bowl during a break from rehearsing as Bruce Springsteen. (MUST CREDIT: Amir Hamja/for the Washington Post) Amir Hamja/for the Washington Post

He chose a professional means of avoiding that question: acting.

He studied Peter Sellers and Mel Blanc. He began impersonating his heroes, such as Al Pacino and Springsteen.

He wanted to be on screen, not in a voice booth, but Azaria’s voice was his sharpest tool. In his early 20s, after bartending while trying to land steady acting work, his theatrical agent got him a core spot on a new animated show called “The Simpsons.” Instead of being Hank the bartender, he began voicing Moe the bartender.

“He just killed every line,” says series creator Matt Groening of Azaria’s audition.

Azaria calls his casting “beyond winning the lottery.” The show will air its 800th episode this year. He’s spent more of his life on the show than off it.

It made him rich. It made his voice box almost universally known.

Azaria hops in and out of those same voices in normal conversation, but even now, he can’t quite describe the mechanics of his instrument. Often it comes down to making small throat and mouth adjustments, like a woodwind player hitting certain notes. Or finding interesting combinations of pre-existing voices, “like blending paint colors.”

For Moe on “The Simpsons,” Azaria uses a dab of Springsteen and a touch of Pacino (“Dog Day Afternoon” era).

Doing a voice isn’t just a parlor trick. It’s the starting point of a transformation in body and spirit. When Azaria sings like Springsteen, he adopts the Boss’s swaggering gait.

“If I start talking like Moe,” Azaria says, talking like Moe, “I’m going to start to get a little angry. He f—ing hates everybody.”

For his breakout movie character Agador Spartacus, the loosey-goosey Guatemalan housekeeper from “The Birdcage,” Azaria simply impersonated his Grandma Esther.

“My grandma’s mentality and her femininity and her care for people and her emotional volatility just — it starts to take over,” he says.

“Everything he said sounded funny, even when it was a straight line,” says his “Birdcage” co-star Nathan Lane. “Every time he talked, you laughed.”

“The Birdcage” came out in 1996, seven years into the run of “The Simpsons” and two years after he landed a prominent guest role on “Friends” as Phoebe’s sometimes love interest. Azaria was 32 and living the dream. He had money, and now it wasn’t just his voices that were famous. He was famous.

But something was missing. Like when he was 15, he had no idea what it was.

When singing as the Boss, he assumes the rock star’s posture. Amir Hamja for The Washington Post

Then, one day about 25 years ago, he was bedside with his friend Matthew Perry at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Perry was hospitalized due to complications from alcoholism, and there was a good chance he wasn’t leaving the hospital alive. Meanwhile, Azaria’s first marriage was dissolving.

The hospital had Al-Anon meetings, geared toward the loved ones of addicts. Azaria figured why not. That first meeting was an epiphany.

Al-Anon’s philosophy could teach him how to cope with almost losing a friend, with losing a marriage. You go to Al-Anon, he says, because “you’re a codependent, you’re hypervigilant. You’re much more concerned with everybody else’s problems than your own.” And you want to stop, and take care of yourself.

Al-Anon helped him sort out his relationships, but he fell deeper into another vice: alcohol.

“At first, it was kind of healthy almost. It was kind of better than running around, chasing people and trying to fix their drinking problems,” Azaria says. “But then it got away from me, and I realized I had a pretty good drinking problem.”

In Al-Anon, he learned enough about alcoholism to take the steps to stop his own drinking before it began seriously affecting his work, before he became tabloid fodder, or ended up in a hospital bed himself.

Seven years after that hospital epiphany, Perry brought Azaria to his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

“What drew me to those rooms was realizing that I got everything I ever wanted and more, and I wasn’t happy,” Azaria says. “That’s a very scary moment. The God-sized hole, we call it. Alcoholics try to fill it up with booze. The problem is the tank empties out every morning, and you have to fill it up again.”

In those meeting rooms, he spent years earning a new identity: sober.

Recovery colors his entire worldview: being of service, taking personal inventory, admitting powerlessness. One of the first things Azaria says in our conversation is “I’m a sober guy.”

This mindset was a life raft when he became the target of a social media campaign for voicing “The Simpsons” character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, an Indian immigrant who owns a convenience store. Hari Kondabolu’s 2017 documentary “The Problem with Apu” questioned whether a White actor from Queens should be voicing one of the only Indian characters on television.

If he still drank, maybe Azaria would have fired back a few irate, defensive tweets. Instead, he relied on what he learned in those meeting rooms: Take a pause. Zip the lip. Feel your feelings and process them before saying anything. Respond, don’t react.

He attended seminars to learn about racism. He befriended Kondabolu and the two men discussed Apu on “Code Switch,” the NPR podcast about race, in 2023. He founded a charity to give grants to organizations that support causes like addiction awareness, military veterans and DEI training.

Apu hasn’t spoken on “The Simpsons” since 2017, but Azaria has used his own voice to discuss the subject with journalists, talk-show hosts and podcasters. Now he is developing a one-man show in which he hopes to tackle it all — Apu, addiction, recovery, identity — as himself.

As Hank Azaria.

So who is Hank Azaria? A “unicorn,” according to his “Brockmire” co-star Amanda Peet.

When asked about the four years she spent working with Azaria, Peet remembers one thing above all else: When she mentioned that her son Henry loves “The Simpsons,” Azaria began sending her videos addressed to the boy in different characters’ voices.

Henry “made us play it like 800 times,” Peet says. “It was like getting a valentine from your crush.”

So, Hank Azaria is a guy who would do that. Hank Azaria is sober. Hank Azaria is a thousand voices, always in search of his own. Hank Azaria is 60 — so why not be a man who’s staring down 80 but commands a stage like he’s 40?

So for now, Hank Azaria is Bruce Springsteen. His voice may still be someone else’s onstage, but the stories are finally becoming his own.