Maurice LaMarche
Maurice LaMarche is an actor, born 1958.
Maurice LaMarche started out as a stand-up comedian in Toronto and has spent more than four decades as one of the busiest voices in American animation. The credits that made his name are 1980s and 1990s television: Chief Quimby on Inspector Gadget, Egon Spengler on The Real Ghostbusters, Big Bob Pataki on Hey Arnold!, Verminous Skumm on Captain Planet and the Planeteers, Father on Codename: Kids Next Door, and, most durably, The Brain on Animaniacs and its spin-off Pinky and the Brain.
The Brain explains the rest. It is a specific actor's cadence, borrowed and applied to a lab mouse with plans for world domination, and it works because LaMarche plays the grandiosity entirely straight. He has voiced Orson Welles on The Simpsons, and that same rich, over-articulated authority shows up wherever a character needs to sound more important than his circumstances justify: Morbo the news anchor and Calculon the robot actor on Futurama, Mr. Big in Zootopia, Odval in Disenchantment.
The counterweight is Kif Kroker, also on Futurama, a permanently exhausted amphibian sigh with nothing grand about him whatsoever. That span, from bellowing to defeated, is why the work keeps arriving: dozens of one-off parts across film, television and games, Alec Baldwin in Team America: World Police, and a Primetime Emmy for outstanding voice-over performance. Most viewers have heard him several hundred times without ever learning his name.
Movies (49)
- Zootopia 2 (2025)
- Zootopia (2016)
- Frozen (2013)
- Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
- Barnyard (2006)
- Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers (2004)
- Open Season 2 (2008)
- The Boxtrolls (2014)
- Cool World (1992)
- 101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure (2003)
- Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 (2012)
- Team America: World Police (2004)
- May the 12th Be with You (2024)
- Kim Possible Movie: So the Drama (2005)
- Tom and Jerry: The Magic Ring (2002)
- Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (2013)
- Mickey's Magical Christmas: Snowed in at the House of Mouse (2001)
- Futurama: Bender's Big Score (2007)
- All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 (1996)
- The Good, the Bart, and the Loki (2021)
- Dead Space: Downfall (2008)
- Balto: Wolf Quest (2002)
- Big Top Scooby-Doo! (2012)
- Balto III: Wings of Change (2004)
- Codename: Kids Next Door: Operation Z.E.R.O. (2006)
- Futurama: Bender's Game (2008)
- Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie (2018)
- Batman vs. Two-Face (2017)
- Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs (2008)
- Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation (1992)
TV (105)
- Rick and Morty (2013)
- The Simpsons (1989)
- Futurama (1999)
- King of the Hill (1997)
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (2010)
- Jackie Chan Adventures (2000)
- Dexter's Laboratory (1996)
- Kim Possible (2002)
- New Looney Tunes (2015)
- Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated (2010)
- The Legend of Korra (2012)
- The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2002)
- Animaniacs (1993)
- Samurai Jack (2001)
- Hey Arnold! (1996)
- Solar Opposites (2020)
- Duckman (1994)
- DuckTales (1987)
- Timon and Pumbaa (1995)
- All Hail King Julien (2014)
- Drawn Together (2004)
- The Looney Tunes Show (2011)
- G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (1983)
- Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness (2011)
- SpongeBob SquarePants (1999)
- Animaniacs (2020)
- Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990)
- Duck Dodgers (2003)
- Pepper Ann (1997)
- Disenchantment (2018)
Where to start with Maurice LaMarche
Start inside Futurama, which catches both ends of his range in one show: Morbo bellowing the news, Kif exhaling his way through another humiliation.
For the signature performance, Pinky and the Brain is an entire series built on one voice doing a nightly impression of an imperial ego, and Animaniacs is where it began. Hey Arnold! uses him in a completely different register, a loud suburban father with real pathos under the volume. Zootopia contains three minutes of the funniest work in the film, a tiny crime boss played with the dignity of a much larger animal. Team America: World Police is the crude one and he is a very good sport in it, while Disenchantment gives the older, drier version of the same authority.
LaMarche playing pomposity from the inside
The comedy works because the character always believes the plan will succeed this time. The Brain is the definitive version, Kif and Calculon split the difference between put-upon and preposterous, and Team America lets him do the register completely straight.
The modern ensembles where he is the deep bench
Three decades in he is still the call when a scene needs an authoritative voice that can turn ridiculous in a syllable. Zootopia gives him the best-known film part, and Rick and Morty and The Simpsons use him for a rotating cast most viewers never separate out.
The nineties cartoons that made him a first call
He came up in the Warner and Cartoon Network boom, where one actor covered four characters an episode and each had to be distinct. Dexter's Laboratory, Samurai Jack and Hey Arnold are the run that built the reputation the later films trade on.