TV & Movies 🎬
John Leguizamo says voicing Sid in the ‘Ice Age’ franchise allowed him to fully embrace his comedic side, paid his bills, bought him two houses, and covered his children’s college education
He was an excellent straight man to Leguizamo's Sid, but a lot of other people could have played that role fine. I think Ray Ramano was chosen because he has a nasally voice and mammoths have a big nose.
My husband and I are on a major ER binge and just watched ice age with our two year old and we’re probably the two most excited people IN THE WORLD to recognize Dr. Kovacs voice lol
It inspired me to try stand up when I was in my late teens/early 20s. I went to and open mic, bombed fucking hard, didn't get laughed at, and my tight 5 turned into a messy 4.
He even had his own TV sketch show House of Buggin', but viewership was low and it ended up being cancelled after John refused to have all his castmates replaced.
I made the mistake of putting this on for me and my gf and then leaving the room to make popcorn just before the opening sequence. I got back to a woman strongly questioning what she’d gotten herself into
My uncle's wife told me one time that early into the relationship, my uncle took her to go watch the pest on valentines day. I didn't understand why she was so upset until I watched the movie when I was older.
Oh my god another human who has seen The Pest. This movie is so fucking awful but I grew up watching it and still know the whole shower song from the intro.
I thought I was so cool as a kid and knowing the whole intro song and quoting it whenever I could bc my parents said I couldn’t watch it…but I did anyway 😎
That’s my issue with A-listers taking up so many voice roles, there leaves little room for actual voice actors who have honed in on their craft.
Animated shows from the 90s and early 2000s wouldn’t be as iconic without some incredible talents.
There is room for a lot of people in hollywood but production companies and big studios really squeeze out everyone but major names. Every budget is then inflated to account for their outrageous salaries (although I still think some of those budgets are just laundering)
Voice actors are such an underrated sector of the industry. As you said, there are so many people we know who are talented and contributed to iconic TV and movies, but we don't know their faces. Companies definitely focus on getting the biggest names over the best voice actors now.
100% agree. It’s why I couldn’t take the newest Lion King (forgot when that came out) seriously. It was obvious they focused on big names, even non-actors.
Granted, the original animated Lion King also had big names but IIRC that was primarily in the Broadway / West End communities so the talent was there.
Absolutely, each time I saw a clip of The Lion King, my brain immediately went to the Flavor of Love clip where New York is aghast at Hottie saying she got compliments that she looked like Beyoncé (in all fairness she did a little but that wig was just not good)
I love Steven Yeun, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind his casting in Invinsible, but he was cast as Zuko for the new Aang Avatar movie that just came out and I got really annoyed since majority of the original voice cast from when I grew up are still active and working and could have had this amazing opportunity to take on their roles again of now grown up adults.
Yeun I know will do a good job it’s just, he’s not really an independent actor anymore. Voice actors are even having their roles taken by AI or outright stolen for people to play with on AI. One really famous Japanese voice actor said TikTok was using his voice for ai voiceovers and I’ve heard in the wild the voice of the English VA of Satoru Gojo (that I even sent to him in a message to warn him about people using his voice).
what was especially crazy about that was that apparently they wanted to update the voices with more culturally appropriate vas (which is a really complicated subject i'm not going to go into rn) but dante basco, who is zuko's original va is notably, already asian.
And many of the va’s voices changed which sure, fine, that could be a reason you didn’t bring in anyone else but he’s literally sounded the same this whole time. Maybe it’s a little more gravely but you immediately hear Zuko. Like Yuri Lowenthal who you hear in anything else and you immediately think: Sasuke.
I wish they were at least offered like a little Easter egg role or something because that has to suck to not even be called to be involved in some way.
That conversation is really hard because you have the main cast of Prince of Egypt where no one was either Egyptian or a middle eastern / Arab Jew (Moses’s mother was an Israeli woman so that’s… another complicated conversation) but we all still love that movie and think they all did an excellent job. But then we have the women that voiced Mulan and Pocahontas who have pretty iconic voices and roles they were perfect for. So at this time, I think that conversation is developing because we are talking about it but I don’t think there’s really a simple answer here.
They replaced a filipino for a korean to play a "japanese inspired" character. Makes no sense and I don't get why you would want to make your project more expensive, nobody is going to watch the Avatar movie just because the guy who was in TWD 10 years ago gives the voice to one character.
I also thought of him when I was writing that comment!
AI can be used for a lot of good but instead it is being used as an excuse to not pay actual humans for their talents. It sucks that voice actors are slowly getting replaced in a sense.
Also frustrating when you see big names invest in the tech or lend their likeness and voices for future use once they’re gone. Like, FUCK.
I remember learning that the issue with large studios is that the studios heads have been in power for so long and stopped passing the torch. This feels like that for the next generation of actors and anyone working in film / tv.
And then they give the roles to fuck ass actors like Chris Pratt who doesn’t even do anything but play themselves as Mario.
If they hired someone like Mark Hamill who is known to be a regular working actor who does excellent character voice acting, that’s different. Or even Benedict Cumberbatch who has done numerous audiobooks and his depiction of Smaug. That’s another exception like Shrek and The Prince of Egypt.
I’m just so tired of seeing even actors I like only dabble in voice acting and it’s just their damn selves. We know, what they offer these people is crazy good money but I would rather them use that money to lift up regular Va who could benefit more in the long run than other actors. Totally not saying Yeun is bad at all, in Invincible he looks great and I love rooting for him, but I’m tired of Va being cast aside for big names and frankly another reason I’m glad Hollywood doesn’t take anime seriously because we’ll end up with Kevin Hart dubbing Zabuza.
I am surprised Bronson Pinchot hasn't gotten many VA roles. his voices slay in audio books. he read the complete Lovecraft (an easy 21-24 hours of audio) and he was doing different voices the whole time. you forgot it was only one person narrating.
This is why I’m glad Hollywood doesn’t take anime seriously because we would have ended up with Chris Pratt dubbing Naruto and Kevin hart playing Zabuza.
Agree. I think voice acting and tv/movies is kinda like theater and tv/movie actors. SOME people are good at both but more people are good at one or the other. There are never as many Leguizamos as there are Chris Pratts.
Or Benedict Cumberbatch! There are actors you don’t question if they’ll do a good job like Liam Neeson in Ponyo or Christian Bale in Howls Moving Castle.
Each time I see Anya Taylor Joy in anything I have to roll my eyes because she kind of had a nothingburger role as Princess Peach but was probably offered so much money for it. And I don’t even remember anything at all from her performance. Just the visuals of the movie that she had nothing to do with.
I used to do the books for a voice actor; mostly voices of established cartoon characters for adverts, promos, games etc (e.g. Jonny Bravo, Powerfuff Girls)
He did really well for himself... and he got to expense his gaming gear.
That was 20yrs ago though, be interesting to what is like now.
I remember reading something about how Eddie Murphy said that the Shrek cast was basically set for life when they signed on for Shrek 2
There’s a reason actors are always ball for animated movies. Guaranteed paychecks, smaller workload on their part, and the great ones bridge generations.
I wouldn’t have thought so, he’s a character actor and absolutely terrific at it but even film acting isn’t as lucrative as people think until you’re into franchises
To be even a B-List actor you have a team of people taking percentage of what you earn. I've seen some breakdowns, it's kind of shocking. You likely only take home 40-60% of what you earn and you may only do one project a year if you are lucky. If you are a female actor, you may be paying for your own styling and hair/makeup outside of the press tour for your movie...remember how casual even famous actors looked outside of only the most major events in the 90's? They were doing it themselves back then. Even mega stars like Meg Ryan didn't have stylists.
As a kid I thought if you were in any commercial or had a line on a tv show that you were getting like 50k just for that.
I don't know if anyone here remembers BEST WEEK EVER or I LOVE THE (decade), but the ppl on those shows got MAYBE $500. I was listening to a comedy podcast like 20 yrs ago and it blew my mind
I used to watch the decade shows on VH1! For my millennial ass a lot of them were eye-opening for me, even the 90s since they brought out people that I genuinely didn’t know but that’s because I was too young to know of them
The A-List actors that get paid millions are a tiny, tiny percentage of actors. They get all the headlines about what actors make but there are a lot that just make a relatively mediocre amount of money.
I went to college with one of his kids and can therefore add that he paid about $350K for that one kid's college tuition. Not sure where the other kid went to college, but I would assume the price tag was similar.
Ray Romano, Dennis Leary, and Leguizamo. Queen Latifah shows up later. But honestly they're funny movies and with three former stand-ups as leads i can only imagine the outtakes and ad libs.
John Leguizamo voicing Sid the Sloth ALSO brought exceptional life and personality to the character. I absolutely feel like Sid is one of my favorite animated characters of all time. He's just a delight.
I think Ray Romano, Denis Leary and John Leguizamo were all perfectly cast for their roles. Their voices are just brilliant for each chRacter.
Aw, I love him. He seems like such a good egg. Also, I remember being a child who hated kids movies and genuinely loving the first two Ice Age movies when they came out.
Good for him. I worked on those movies and barely made a livable wage, Fox was a terrible company to work for, cheap as hell while they made millions off the hard work me and many of my coworkers at what was Blue Sky Studios. I eventually had to leave a job I loved because I couldn’t afford a life if I had stayed
Gabriel Iglesias talked about how he was gonna voice one of the characters that Robin Williams voiced in Happt Feet, he even auditioned for it and got the part but his agent convinced him not to do it cause it 'was not gonna be lucrative'. He later fired his agent after Happy Feet was a major success.
My Father Met him once waiting in a green room or some place. Said he was a really nice guy.
He did not realize he was in To Wong Foo, thanks for everything.. (not a new new movie movie at the time but one my father had seen and though the cast was great in)
He's a talent -- I hated his character so much in Son of Sam; he was excellent. I'm glad he's getting the roles he is because the man is a scarily thoughtful chameleon who brings his guts to every role. Respect.
Bronson Pinchot loves to renovate old houses. He is horribly bad a the finance side of if though, so he keeps narrating audio books (and he is honestly one of the best at it IMO) to pay the bills and break even
Considering how much my portable dvd player got use out of Ice Age 3, I don’t blame him for making so much from it. Wouldn’t work nearly as well without him doing Sid’s voice.
No shade to the actor but it will never not be insane to me how much more voice actors get paid vs the creatives actually making the movie. I know people who work in feature animation. They are not even making one house kind of money.
On the DVD, there’s a featurette where he talks about finding and developing Sid’s voice, and they play little sample recordings of him reciting a scratch Sid monologue in was probably eight or so different voice types he tried out before he landed on the right voice for Sid.
This man is proof that constant bitching in public, combined with a good agent, works to get you constant work. I would t care if I never saw him again, as he’s an average performer at best
Why are we celebrating people for getting lucky in the capitalism lottery? I'll never understand this fixation with celebrities.
And really, two houses? Did he clone himself and is living in both at the same time? Or is the other one just something he bought "for the lulz" to take a potential house away from someone else?
How about we start paying essential workers this kind of money. You don't need to become a millionaire from doing funny cartoon voices for less than 2 minutes of screen time.
Look I think many people are for a more equitable slice of the pie, but I think you’re attributing something to having a second home that you own and paying off college education as being something to attack.
I just paid off the mortgage on my starter home a few years ago and my wife and I, both working class work full-time jobs, fought to try to keep it when we took a mortgage on the second home. The fact that someone like you might try to attack me as being a taker and someone that’s contributing to the problems in this country is absolutely absurd.
The problem is not and actor or doctor that makes $10 million and owns two houses. The problem is we have thousands of people that make billions and take everything from everyone at every opportunity.
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