Christopher Knights
Christopher Knights is an actor, born 1972.
Christopher Knights is a film editor and camera operator who ended up with a voice career because he was in the room. He started at Amblimation, working on We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story and Balto, then moved to DreamWorks, where he cut animation and picked up scratch vocal parts that stayed in the finished films.
That is how a British editor became the voice of the Three Blind Mice and Thelonious, Lord Farquaad's hooded henchman, across the Shrek series, while also serving as an associate editor on it. The bigger job came with Madagascar in 2005, where he voices Private, the smallest and sweetest of the penguins, a role he has carried through three sequels, the Penguins of Madagascar spin-off and a run of holiday specials. He has worked repeatedly with the British cameraman and voice actor Simon J. Smith.
There is not much more to say, and that is the interesting part. His filmography is a technical career with an accidental performing one grafted onto it, which is a fairly common story inside animation studios and almost never visible from outside.
Movies (23)
- Shrek (2001)
- Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024)
- Shrek 2 (2004)
- Madagascar (2005)
- The Bad Guys 2 (2025)
- Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008)
- Penguins of Madagascar (2014)
- Megamind (2010)
- Shrek Forever After (2010)
- Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted (2012)
- Shrek the Third (2007)
- Flushed Away (2006)
- Rumble (2021)
- Shrek the Halls (2007)
- The Madagascar Penguins in a Christmas Caper (2005)
- Merry Madagascar (2009)
- Scared Shrekless (2010)
- Madly Madagascar (2013)
- Shrek 3-D (2004)
- Donkey's Christmas Shrektacular (2010)
- The Bad Guys: Little Lies and Alibis (2025)
- Shrek in the Swamp Karaoke Dance Party (2001)
- The Penguins of Madagascar - Operation: Penguin Takeover (2014)
Where to start with Christopher Knights
To hear him properly, put on Madagascar. Private is the emotional register of the penguin unit, and Knights gives him a genuine sweetness rather than a squeak.
If you like the penguins, Penguins of Madagascar is the feature that hands them the whole film, and Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted is the best of the sequels by some distance. For the other half of his voice work, Shrek has him as Thelonious and the blind mice, small parts scattered through a film he also helped edit.
Beyond that it thins out quickly. Flushed Away gives him a couple of London rodents worth listening for, and The Bad Guys 2 has him narrating. Nobody needs to complete this filmography.
The Madagascar penguins
Private is the role, and the penguins went from a background gag in the first film to the owners of the franchise by the time of the spin-off. The Christmas short is where the four of them first got their own story.
The Shrek films
He cut these as an associate editor and voiced the Blind Mice and Thelonious in them, which is the double job the whole career is built on. The first two are the ones that matter and the shorts are curiosities.
The other DreamWorks work
Small voice parts scattered across two decades of the studio's output, generally one or two lines picked up while he was already working on the film. Flushed Away and Megamind are the best pictures of the group.