'Futurama’s Multi-Voiced Maurice LaMarche Gets Wordy with Us'

NERDIST

(excerpted)

N: I remember when I saw Ed Wood, I was like, “Wow, Vincent D’Onofrio did this great impersonation.” It turns out that was you dubbed in. Did that bug you, that people thought it was all him?

MLM: It did, at the time. As I said, it was a more sensitive time. But with the Internet now, anybody who takes a passing interest in the movie knows it as a piece of trivia just from looking it up on IMDB, that the voice is done by me. I heard that Vincent was not upset personally with me, but he felt bad that they didn’t use his original performance. He actually went out and with his own money produced a short film called “Five Minutes with Mr. Welles,” in which he did make a greater attempt at getting the voice right, because he really does look like him. In the dailies that they sent me, D’Onofrio was doing this really sort of high-pitched with him. It was almost effeminate. Burton, I guess, felt that was not the way to go after piecing the scene together. Being an animator, he was a fan of Pinky and the Brain, and called up and said, “Call me the guy who does the Brain. We just gotta dub this.” They flew me up to San Francisco, and I dubbed it in one day. It was on my birthday, actually. And there it is. It’s stuck to the tape. But no credit. We actually offered to cut my salary because I got an over-scale fee for that, and I said, “well, take it down to scale, and just give me a credit.” And they went, “Nope. Keep your money. We’re not going to give credit.”