Justin Roiland
Justin Roiland is an actor, born 1980.
Justin Roiland co-created Rick and Morty for Adult Swim and voiced both leads from 2013 to 2022, then co-created Solar Opposites for Hulu and voiced Korvo from 2020 to 2022. He also founded the animation studio Justin Roiland's Solo Vanity Card Productions! and the video game studio Squanch Games.
The interesting thing about the voice work is that it is a two-hander performed by one person. Rick's rasp and Morty's stammer belong to the same throat, which is why the arguments between them play less like a conversation than like a single mind at war with itself, one half contemptuous and the other half terrified. It is a deliberately ugly, unpolished sound, closer to a recording of someone improvising alone in a booth than to traditional animation voice work, and it set the tone for a decade of American adult cartoons that followed.
Before that he was a reliable supplier of grotesques for other people's shows: the Earl of Lemongrab in Adventure Time, a shrieking sour aristocrat that remains the strangest thing in a strange series, Blendin Blandin in Gravity Falls, and Oscar in Fish Hooks. He voiced Clumpy in Krampus, Garry in Smallfoot, and appeared as Rick and Morty in Space Jam: A New Legacy.
In early 2023 both networks severed ties with him following accusations of domestic violence and abuse, and he resigned from Squanch Games. Those charges were later dismissed for insufficient evidence, and further allegations of sexual assault were reported in September 2023. His run on both series ended with the 2022 seasons.
Movies (8)
TV (17)
- Rick and Morty (2013)
- Rick and Morty (2013)
- Adventure Time (2010)
- Gravity Falls (2012)
- Solar Opposites (2020)
- Solar Opposites (2020)
- Uncle Grandpa (2013)
- Fish Hooks (2010)
- The Sarah Silverman Program. (2007)
- The Boys Presents: Diabolical (2022)
- Pig Goat Banana Cricket (2015)
- Yo Gabba Gabba! (2007)
- Cheap Seats (2004)
- Future-Worm! (2016)
- Acceptable.tv (2007)
- Koala Man (2023)
- Yacht Rock (2005)
Where to start with Justin Roiland
Rick and Morty is unavoidable and the first two seasons are the ones to watch, before the show became a franchise with a mythology to service. The pilot alone tells you whether the voice is going to work for you, because the voice is the entire proposition.
If it does, Solar Opposites is the lighter, more consistently written sibling, and Korvo is essentially Rick with the intelligence swapped for arrogance.
His best guest work is elsewhere. Adventure Time gets the Earl of Lemongrab, a handful of episodes of pure anti-comedy that people still argue about, and Gravity Falls gives him Blendin Blandin, a nervous time agent whose whole joke is incompetence. Fish Hooks is the early Disney work and Space Jam: A New Legacy is a cameo you can safely skip.
Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites
The two shows he co-created and voiced. Rick and Morty's early seasons sound the way they do largely because both leads were recorded as near-improvisation by one person. Both shows recast his roles in 2023.
The guest voice work
A decade of one-off and recurring parts across American animation. The Earl of Lemongrab in Adventure Time is the best of them and one of the strangest characters that show produced.
The films
The feature credits are mostly small voice parts rather than leads. Smallfoot is the biggest of them, and Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus is the one its fans had waited fifteen years for.