Maurice LaMarche Talks Dan Vs., Futurama and Tom Cruise

You probably know Maurice LaMarche from his work on The Simpsons, Futurama or Ultimate Spider-Man…but just few weeks ago, he was playing a broccoli monster on Dan Vs. for The Hub.And, no, it really wasn’t anything like his regular monster gig, Morbo the terrifying alien newscaster on Futurama.LaMarche joined ComicBook.com to talk about his impressive career and what it’s like to be the guy who has to do all the wacky voices on a show like Dan Vs. or Ultimate Spider-Man, where many of the characters are just basically talking like themselves.ComicBook.com: You are really interesting as a fit for the show, because while just about everyone else on the series does a variation on their own voice, you’re obviously a guy who is employed to do a series of over-the-top voices.Maurice LaMarche: Well, you said something very key–you hire Dave Foley, you get Dave Foley. You hire Curtis to get Curtis and Paget’s wonderful; she’s got that sweet, wholesome kind of voice. It’s really rich–there’s so much texture to Paget’s voice; it’s girly and it’s womanly and it’s great. But when you hire me, you’re doing it so you can three for the price of one.Very rarely do I do anything talking like this–this is the way I talk day in and day out, and I don’t think I’ve ever done this in a cartoon. The closest thing to my real voice is my Lexus commercial, which is me, the way I talk when maybe I’m just whispering in someone’s ear. It’s almost like a bedroom voice, you know? Yet it’s stern and it’s informed, but that’s the closest thing to hearing me talk. But on something like Dan Vs., I walk in and the director will say, “Okay, today you’re a broccoli monster and an army colonel and a vegan, sort of Whole Foods-type shopkeeper. Go!”I’ve got to be three very different guys, find each of these guys inside me, and in the case of the broccoli monster I’ve got to be both frightening and pathetic. For me as an actor, I actually love that–it’s almost like a British theater kind of approach of sort of disappearing into a character. The American way is to sell your personality and be a personality, you know?Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise in pretty much everything he does, which is why I loved what he did in Tropic Thunder. That’s why when Tom Cruise disappeared into that agent guy in Tropic Thunder, that’s when he got me. Tom Cruise got me with that picture because he was something other than being Tom Cruise. I admire that he can climb buildings and he does his own stunts and everything–that’s great, that’s something I can’t do–but that idea of being something other than you but finding that person in you is the fun of acting. I get to do that without having to sit for four hours in prosthetics.