Rick and Morty Exec Explains How Justin Roiland's Replacements Were Found
Rick and Morty's showrunner opened up about how they found new voices after Justin Roiland's exit.
Rick and Morty has revealed the new voice actors replacing former voice star and co-creator Justin Roiland, and the showrunner behind the series explained how they found the new stars during a lengthy and extensive auditioning process! Although Adult Swim had been keeping them a secret until Rick and Morty's Season 7 premiere, it's now been announced that Ian Cardoni will be the new voice star behind Rick Sanchez and Harry Belden will be the new voice behind Morty Smith. Opening up about the search for Roiland's replacements, these two actors were picked out a group that numbered in the thousands.
Rick and Morty showrunner Scott Marder opened up about the process of finding a new Rick and Morty in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter and revealed that they actually auditioned thousands of potential replacements for Roiland, and went through various waves of auditions to test out the standouts even further. With finding relative newcomers for the roles, Marder explained that Cardoni and Belden were the ones who made it through all of the rigorous testing.
How Rick and Morty Found Its New Rick and Morty
"Ian was one of the first people I heard when the search began; he was in the first wave: 'Mark that guy, he's got major flashes of Rick,' which was awesome," Marder began when explaining how they settled on Ian Cardoni and Harry Belden. "We found Harry a lot later. They just stood out. At a certain point, we couldn't expect the first wave to just nail it from start to finish. Anyone that we felt like had pure moments of either character, we had to bring back and see what they could do on their feet. We brought those guys back in with a wave of people a ton of times and made them go through a bunch of sides and do all scenes in a way we wouldn't even do normally just to see what their stamina was and if they could stay in voice. We put them through a pretty rigorous process."
It turns out that these actors weren't recommended but instead came through casting calls, "They both came through rigorous casting calls. Ian was early on and Harry came after we exhausted every resource. We had multiple waves of narrowing people down." Wanting to keep the search as open as possible, Marder auditioned many, many potential actors, "Thousands came through that got whittled down to hundreds who made it to us. We looked far and wide. If the perfect Morty lived in Norway, we were going to figure out how to work with the horrible time gap. We were trying to be open-minded."
As for finding actors who could match the previous Rick and Morty voices, Marder explained, "The high-class problem that Harmon and I had was that we were writing season nine — seasons beyond where we're at right now. So it didn't feel like the tone for the show could magically change. We wrote consistently the same show, and we needed the voices to be the same."
How are you liking Rick and Morty's new voices in Season 7 so far? Let us know all of your thoughts about it in the comments! You can even reach out to me directly about all things animation and other cool stuff @Valdezology on Twitter!
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