Zach Hadel
Zach Hadel is an actor, born 1993.
Zach Hadel came up on the internet under the name psychicpebbles, making Flash animation for an audience that found him rather than the other way round. He started the web series Hellbenders with Chris O'Neill in 2012, co-founded the independent studio ZAM, and became a co-host of the Let's Play series OneyPlays, a career path that did not exist twenty years earlier and now routinely produces television.
In his case the television is Smiling Friends, co-created with Michael Cusack for Adult Swim, where he also voices Charlie Dompler and Glep. It is the rare internet-to-network transfer that did not sand off whatever made the original work funny: the timing is still deliberately wrong, the drawing is still ugly on purpose, and the show still switches animation styles mid-scene for a joke that lasts four seconds.
His voice is a large part of why it works. Hadel plays exhaustion better than almost anyone in animation, the specific sound of a man who has run out of patience but remains professionally obliged to be helpful, and that register has made him a useful guest elsewhere: a sinner in Hazbin Hotel, additional voices in Helluva Boss, an appearance in The Amazing Digital Circus and its feature.
Movies (3)
TV (6)
Where to start with Zach Hadel
Everything starts with Smiling Friends. Watch from the pilot and in order; the episodes are short and the show grows steadily more confident about how strange it is willing to be. Hadel's Charlie is the audience surrogate, which in this show means the one who is merely annoyed rather than deranged.
If you want the earlier internet version of the same sensibility, OneyPlays is the unedited article, hours of him and his friends failing at video games, and it will be either exactly your sense of humour or completely impenetrable. The Amazing Digital Circus and Hazbin Hotel are guest spots in other people's independent-animation hits, both worth a look for how much that scene now overlaps. Helluva Boss is the deepest cut of the three.