If you’ve played a Fallout game, you’ve undoubtedly come across a Mister Handy at one point. These robots often go by different, more personalized names depending on their profession or who owns them, but they all share the same design of a floating sphere with arm-like and eye-like appendages protruding from their body. Perhaps more recognizable than their design, however, is the overly courteous voice that’s shared between each of them so that they remain polite and expressive even when threatening violence. It makes sense then that Mister Handy would show up in Prime Video’s Fallout TV show, but the live-action series takes things a step further by not only incorporating Mister Handy into several episodes but also by providing an explanation for where that signature voice came from.
You’ll see a Mister Handy model right from the start of Fallout in the very first episode, but it’s until later on in the series that we learn where the robot’s voice came from. If you haven’t gotten far in the show, be warned that this breakdown of Mister Handy’s vocal origins contains spoilers.
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Mister Handy’s Voice in Fallout, Explained
The Mister Handy robot makes its biggest Fallout show appearance in Episode 4 whenever Lucy is forced into a Super Duper Mart and meets Snip Snip, a Mister Handy who’s most definitely named after his profession, but it’s not until Episode 6 that we learn more about the voice. The explanation comes from some pre-war scenes set at actor Cooper Howard’s house where one of his actor friends showed up.
That actor friend is Sebastian Leslie, a character played by Matt Berry of What We Do in the Shadows fame. Berry plays Laszlo Cravensworth in What We Do in the Shadows, so if you’re familiar with his performance there or at least his voice, you can already tell where this is going.
At the party, Sebastian is asked by some of the caterers to do his butler voice. No specific show is mentioned, but we can infer from the conversation that Sebastian plays a butler-type character on the show. He does the voice, and it sounds a whole lot like the one Snip Snip has back in Episode 4.
Cooper discusses his Vault-Tec advertisements he’s participated in to promote the Vaults, and Sebastian points out that while those ads haven’t gone over well with other actors, he, too, has done some ad work himself.
“I mean I’ve dipped my bits into the same gravy train,” he tells Cooper. “Sold my vocal rights to that spinning robot they sell to housewives and perverts.”
He’s obviously talking about Mister Handy here, and he says that he only got $186 for the vocal rights in addition to his agent throwing in a Mister Handy as part of the deal. Cooper asks about that butler character and points out that it was owned by a studio, though Sebastian says that RobCo Industries, the company best associated with the Mister Handy model after it helped General Atomics refine it, bought the studio and therefore owned his butler character.
To solidify the lore, Berry is also credited as the voices for the Mister Handy appearances in the Fallout show, too, so Fallout fans now have an answer for where Mister Handy got its voice. Actor Sebastian Leslie sold over his vocal rights for a butler character to RobCo, and the rest was history.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that there are instances in the Fallout games where Mister Handy features a different voice from the one you’d think of first, so while Sebastian’s voice seems to be the primary one for the Mister Handy models, there appear to be some regional or model variants.
The Fallout show also gave an origin story to the iconic Vault Boy mascot, too, which is even more interesting than the one for Mister Handy.
