Hank Azaria

Hank Azaria arrived at The Simpsons in 1989 with almost no voice acting experience and became a regular in the second season. Decades later he is a substantial fraction of Springfield: Moe Szyslak, Chief Wiggum, Comic Book Guy, Professor Frink, Snake, Duffman, Superintendent Chalmers, Kirk Van Houten. Four Primetime Emmys have come out of that work. He no longer voices Apu Nahasapeemapetilon.

The thing that separates him from most voice actors is that his voices are characters rather than noises. Wiggum is lazy in a specific, self-pitying way. Frink's stammer is a nervous system rather than a gag. Moe carries a real bitterness the show has mined for tragedy more than once. Very few performers build that much interiority into a caricature and keep it consistent for more than three decades.

His live-action career has been steadier than people remember. Agador in The Birdcage won him a Screen Actors Guild award and is a piece of unembarrassed comic commitment. He was Phoebe's scientist boyfriend in Friends, a nervous hanger-on in Heat, a news cameraman in Godzilla, a cutlery-throwing superhero with an invented British accent in Mystery Men, and Gargamel in the Smurfs films, which suggests the cheques have been reasonable. He is one of very few people who can be genuinely funny using only his voice and genuinely good using the rest of himself.