Charles Martinet

Mario's father speaks in The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023), and the voice coming out of him is the one anybody who has held a Nintendo controller since the mid-nineties will know in a syllable. Chris Pratt plays Mario as an ordinary, mildly nervous man, and Fogel's script has a line to explain why he does not sound like the games. The man who did sound like the games has been handed the father instead. Our review called it the film's one joke with any patience behind it, and it still is. It is also, as far as the cinema is concerned, almost the whole of Charles Martinet's reputation, delivered in a cameo.

The voice came out of an audition in 1991 for a real-time animation system at a trade show. Martinet talked for about half an hour, inventing scenarios about pizza and pasta until the tape ran out, and what he settled on was a high, bright Italian-American instead of the gruff Brooklyn stereotype he could easily have reached for. His own account is simple: "I have a principle of comedy of always being kind." Super Mario 64 (1996) put that voice in front of a very large audience and fixed the catchphrases, and he went on to record Mario, Luigi, Wario and Waluigi across roughly 150 games before stepping back from game recording in August 2023. The accents were not luck; he had trained in them at Drama Studio London after a Berkeley Repertory Theatre apprenticeship.

It is a narrower instrument than the catalogue suggests, and we think that is to his credit. The one widely cited exception is Paarthurnax, the deep, gravelly dragon in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), which we have not played and will not judge, but which at least proves the squeak was a choice. Everything in the Mario voice is a decision to be gentle: the pitch, the enthusiasm, the refusal to let an Italian plumber sound like a threat to a six-year-old.

On film there is almost nothing to weigh. In David Fincher's The Game (1997) he is Nicholas's father, the dead man whose memory the film keeps returning to, and our review did not single him out because there is nothing to single out; it is a face, not a performance. The Mario film is the only time we have been able to watch him act, and we will admit that when the father spoke we felt a pang we had not expected from a film that otherwise waits for us to laugh. It was the sound itself, unchanged after thirty years, placed in the mouth of a character who is about to be left behind by his son, and the film knew exactly what it was doing with it.

He now performs the voice live for fans as Nintendo's Mario Ambassador and improvises nothing outside it, which is an odd place for a man who got the part by improvising for thirty minutes to end up. The character has outgrown the actor and the actor seems content with that. Do not go looking for him in films; go looking for the father, and listen.