Ben Schwartz

A hedgehog who has spent ten years alone in a wood and is now saying everything he never got to say. That is how Ben Schwartz voices Sonic in Jeff Fowler's Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), with a quip for every second he is on screen, and it is the clearest picture of what he does. His characters are pleased with themselves, have not noticed they are getting it wrong, and are saved from our dislike by the energy of the talking. He has said he tries to make them arrogant on purpose.

He came up through long-form improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, wrote jokes for Letterman and SNL, and took small parts from 2006. The break was Jean-Ralphio Saperstein in Michael Schur's Parks and Recreation (2010–2015), a recurring part that fixed the type: the friend of a friend whose confidence outruns any reason for it, funny because he never notices that everyone around him has stopped smiling. House of Lies (2012–2016) made him a series regular as Clyde Oberholt. Then the voice work, and with it Sonic, reprised in sequels of which Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024) is the one we liked best. Alongside all that he has kept improvising, on the Middleditch & Schwartz specials (2020) with Thomas Middleditch and on tour as Ben Schwartz & Friends, and turned up in Space Force and The Afterparty.

The improv is the key. He has said that the largest thing about it is "listening to the person in front of you", and that is what the television parts give him: someone to bounce off, a scene that turns on a reaction. The films have given him less. As Sonic he talks to himself for long stretches, and Fowler never finds the still moment in the first film that would let the loneliness register. By the third, with Idris Elba's Knuckles and Colleen O'Shaughnessey's Tails to interrupt him, there is at least a team, and the film is a little better for it, though Jim Carrey's two Robotniks are the reason to stay.

Renfield (2023) is the cautionary case. Tedward Lobo, idiot heir to a crime family run by Shohreh Aghdashloo, is exactly the part Schwartz was built for, and Chris McKay's film parks him in a subplot about corrupt police that has nothing to do with Nicolas Cage's Dracula. Somewhere past the hour we caught ourselves wishing his scenes over so Cage could come back, and we did not enjoy feeling that about an actor whose whole method depends on being generous to whoever is opposite him. The performance was fine. Nobody had given him anyone worth listening to.

The nearest thing to a reservation about Schwartz is not about him at all; it is that improv itself stays a small pleasure most audiences never see. The films that hire him have taken the speed and left the listening at the theatre door. Put him in a scene with an actor who answers back and he keeps it alive. Put him alone with a microphone and he is a fast thing that will not stop talking.