Josh Robert Thompson
Josh Robert Thompson is an actor, born 1975.
His best-known job was a voice coming out of a robot skeleton. On The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Thompson performed Geoff Peterson, a mechanical sidekick parked beside the host's desk, and the bit worked because the voice could go anywhere, in any register, at speed.
He is an impressionist by trade, which explains the shape of the rest of the record. He supplies voices for Family Guy and American Dad!, and on Inside Job he plays Ken Burns, JFK and Jimmy Fallon, which is a fair summary of the range in a single credit line. He does celebrity impersonations on The Howard Stern Show and on Red Letter Media's Best of the Worst, and Morgan Freeman is among the voices in the repertoire.
The film work is mostly utility: narrator on Yogi Bear and Scary Movie 5, additional voices on The Nut Job 2, a technician in PAW Patrol: The Movie, two birds in The Angry Birds Movie, incidental parts in Michael Jackson's Halloween. This is what the industry does with impressionists, hiring them for the jobs that need a voice to sound like something familiar without costing what the familiar voice costs.
The record is thinner in leading roles than his talent suggests. Talk-show sidekick is a strange career peak, but it was a genuinely funny one.
Movies (6)
TV (4)
Where to start with Josh Robert Thompson
You have heard him without knowing it, so the point of starting anywhere is to attach the voice to a person.
Do that with The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Geoff Peterson is his real body of work, a nightly double act performed through a puppet, and clips of it hold up better than most late-night comedy of the period. Inside Job is the best sample of the impression range in a scripted show, because the writers openly use him as a one-man roster of famous voices.
Family Guy and American Dad! are where the day job lives, largely one-off voices scattered across long runs. The features are for completists: Yogi Bear and Scary Movie 5 give him narration duties, and The Angry Birds Movie a couple of small characters. Fun to spot, no reason to seek out on their own.