Michael Wallis
Michael Wallis is an actor, born 1945.
The day job is history. Wallis has written seventeen books, the best known of them Route 66: The Mother Road, and his journalism has run in Time, Life, People, Smithsonian, The New Yorker and The New York Times. That is a full career with no acting in it at all.
Then Pixar cast him as Sheriff in Cars, and the result is the smartest piece of voice casting in the studio's history. Radiator Springs is a town that the interstate killed, which is the exact subject Wallis had spent decades writing about, and he reads the part in a flat, unhurried voice with real road miles in it, which no trained actor would have arrived at. Sheriff sounds like a real man in a real dying town, which is why the film's melancholy lands.
He has kept the job ever since, through Cars 2 and Cars 3 and the short films around them, Mater and the Ghostlight, Tokyo Mater, Hiccups and the rest. His book on Billy the Kid also sits in this catalogue, and it is the better introduction to what he actually does for a living.
Movies (7)
Books (1)
Where to start with Michael Wallis
Cars is the whole voice career in one film and by far the best of them, partly because it is the one that cares about the road he wrote a book about. Watch it with the casting in mind and Sheriff stops being a cartoon cop.
After that, Cars 3 is the sequel that returns to the same melancholy and gives the older characters something to do, while Cars 2 is the spy pastiche and the weakest use of him.
The short films, Mater and the Ghostlight and Tokyo Mater, are pleasant and disposable. The genuinely rewarding item is Billy the Kid, his own book, which is where the historian rather than the voice actor shows up, and it is a good deal harder-headed about the American West than anything with a talking car in it.