Peter Cullen gives Optimus Prime authority through a deep, measured voice, and we value him most when that authority sounds tired. He can make a machine worth listening to even when the film around it is not.
Fi1m perspective
In Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023), Optimus Prime wants to get his people home and is less concerned about what that might cost everyone else. Cullen lets fatigue into the voice without losing its authority. We felt for him more than we expected to, because Cullen makes that impatience sound like the failing of someone worn down by responsibility. Steven Caple Jr.'s film gives him a fault to play, and Cullen makes more of it than another declaration of heroic purpose could. We still have substantial reservations about the film around him.
Cullen first voiced Optimus in the television series The Transformers (1984), took him into the 1986 film, and returned for the live-action Transformers (2007). He stayed with the live-action sequels through Rise of the Beasts, making a familiar voice a substantial part of the character's continuity. His animation work also includes Eeyore in The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1988), so the recurring assignments have not all required heroic authority. Still, it is Optimus who has defined much of his work, and there is a risk that familiarity becomes all a film asks of him.
We do not need Cullen to discard that measured delivery. The interest in Rise of the Beasts is how little he has to alter it to suggest a leader who puts his own people ahead of the locals. The earlier films never asked him for this tiredness, and it gives the familiar voice something new to express. But it cannot compensate for a film whose engaging first hour gives way to plot and shouting.
Predator (1987) is the better film to choose, and a less obvious way to hear him work. Cullen supplies the creature's uncredited vocal effects, including its clicks. We would not make one voice responsible for the suspense in John McTiernan's alien hunt, but those unsettling sounds are a useful reminder of what Cullen can do without dialogue. Crude dialogue and thin characterisation are the film's caveats; neither stops it from gripping. Start there if noble robots have exhausted your patience.
Biography
Peter Cullen was a Canadian-American voice actor. Born in Montreal, he trained at the National Theatre School of Canada and began his career in radio and television in the late 1960s.
He was best known for voicing Optimus Prime in the Transformers franchise, beginning with the 1984 animated series and returning for the live-action films from Transformers (2007) through Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023). Other notable roles included Eeyore in the Winnie the Pooh franchise, the vocalisations of the Predator in the 1987 film, and Monterey Jack in Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.
Cullen received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 2023. He died in Los Angeles on 26 August 2026, aged 85.
