Chris Pratt said he had some trouble finding the voice for Mario in The Super Mario Bros Movie, which premiered Wednesday before Easter weekend.
The 43-year-old actor, whose casting in the animated adventure has sparked some controversy, had his first attempt at an accent rejected after it was too close to James Gandolfini’s accent for Tony Soprano in HBO’s iconic crime drama The Sopranos.
Pratt explained that he had very little lead on how to go about creating the character in a Zoom chat with costars Charlie Day, Anya Taylor-Joy, Keegan-Michael Key and Jack Black for Weekly entertainment.
‘Are they Italians? Are they American? We know a little bit about Charles Martinet’s voice that he sprinkled in there with the “Wahoo!” and “It’s a me!” and this Mario stuff, but how do you create a 90 minute story with an emotional flow and create a living, breathing person that you care about?’ explained the action star.
“If you take out the jokes and the magic and the mushrooms and the power-ups and the coloring and the great music, it should be a pretty good drama, which is really the key to a great story.”
Voice: Chris Pratt, 43, had some trouble finding the voice for Mario in The Super Mario Bros Movie. For a minute when I came in they said, “That’s a little Tony Soprano, that’s a little New Jersey, you’re doing a Tony Soprano thing.”
When he first tackled the role, Chris said he sounded a little too much like a mob boss.
“For a minute when I came in, they were like, ‘That’s a little Tony Soprano, that’s a little New Jersey, you’re doing a Tony Soprano thing.'”
Charlie Day, 47, who provided the voice for Luigi, said he also struggled to find the right tone.
“Sometimes they’d say, ‘Charlie, maybe a little less Goodfellas in this one.'”
“I’m like, “Okay! I think you’re wrong, but okay!’ — until they landed on something they liked,” said the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star.
For Chris, repetition was key.
“I would have one of the rules. I wouldn’t say it once,’ he explained.
“After doing it over and over, 15 different options, casual options, in my own words, different tones, and by the end they’d be so exhausted if they heard them all, that I thought, ‘Well, that’s everything. I’ve just cleared all possibilities, so can we move on?”
When creating the voice for Toad, Keegan-Michael Key, 52, had some help.
Repetition: For Chris, repetition was key to finding Mario’s voice. “After doing it over and over again, 15 different options, informal options, in my own words, (using) different tones,” he said
Goodfellas: Charlie Day, 47, who provided the voice for Luigi, said he also struggled to find the right tone. “Sometimes they’d say, ‘Charlie, maybe a little less Goodfellas in this one'”
“What I really did is I based it on a friend of mine,” he argued
“I based his vocal rhythms and vocal syntax on a friend of mine and when I took it to the director he said, ‘that’s cool, I like that, but can we get the voice higher because we want to make sure are that we’re “referring to all those exclamations he makes during the games.”
The actor said the high tones strain his vocal cords.
“For me it was gallons of Earl Gray and honey and really tight pants.”