Kevin Michael Richardson

Most people who have heard Kevin Michael Richardson have never heard his name. The voice is the thing: a bass with gravel underneath, unhurried, coming out of something large that means you harm. That is Captain Gantu in Lilo & Stitch (2002), the part that made his reputation, and it is the Joker in The Batman (2004), where he took the character down into a growl and became the first African-American actor to play him. Producers have been reaching for that sound since the mid-1990s, and they have not been wrong to.

He trained as a stage actor at Syracuse and spent the early 1990s in commercials and on-camera parts before the voice found its market. His first big animated role was Mayor Tilton in The Mask: The Animated Series (1995), and from there the work came in quantity: the Seth MacFarlane shows, where The Cleveland Show (2009) let him be silly rather than menacing, the DC animations, and in 2021 both the Mauler Twins in Invincible and Dr Hibbert on The Simpsons, taking over from Harry Shearer. He has recorded alongside the same people for decades; Jeff Bennett, Grey DeLisle and Dee Bradley Baker have each shared a booth with him on well over a hundred productions. This is the working life of a voice actor, and he has had a good one.

The complaint, such as it is, is that the bass is all anyone asks for. The interesting thing about his recent film work is that it is not. Kamek, in The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026), is played high and thin, with a wheedling accent somewhere in the neighbourhood of Peter Lorre. We did not know it was him. When we found out, we were more interested in the casting than in anything either film had given Kamek to do, which is the fairest thing we can say about them: we scored the first 56 and the second 38, and in the second Kamek is one of several villains from the games put on screen to be recognised rather than to be funny. It is a good trick in a film that has no patience for tricks that take longer than a second.

He also turned up as Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008), a film we thought was a television pilot that had wandered into cinemas, and neither the part nor the film asked much of him.

So the shape of it is this: a voice that has been frightening children for three decades, and a few recent signs that the man behind it would like to do something else with it. The Mario films noticed, and then gave him nothing to do with the discovery. Someone should.