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A household voice thanks to his performances as Apu, Moe, Chief Wiggum and others in The Simpsons, Hank Azaria has a keen ear and a ready wit as FOCUS finds out.
The return of Ben Stiller as Larry Daley, once a hapless night security guard now an inventor of weird gadgets, sees him face a new foe in Night At The Museum 2.
But his enemy on screen is played by an old friend, Hank Azaria, who has appeared with him in films such as Mystery Men, Along Came Polly and Dodgeball.
Azaria plays Kahmunrah, an Ancient Egyptian pharaoh reanimated by a magical artefact, who is keen to unleash his demonic army to enslave mankind. The vocally dextrous actor also provides the voices for two other characters brought to life in this bizarre nocturnal world, Rodin’s Thinker (who is not so bright as his name might suggest) and revered former president Abraham Lincoln.
Yet for anyone with even a passing knowledge of movie history the portrayal of Kahmunrah, a lisping English accent of a certain vintage, is a delicious in-joke inspired as it is by Boris Karloff. The man who embodied Frankenstein’s monster also played, in 1932, Im-ho-tep in Universal's horror flick The Mummy.
Born William Pratt, and a keen batsmen for the Hollywood Cricket Club, Karloff was much in demand for these popular horror tales and much later lent his voice to Chuck Jones’ animated short How The Grinch Stole Christmas.
"The Grinch was definitely on my mind," Azaria nods. "I didn’t see the original Mummy until I knew I was going to do this, but I knew Karloff from other stuff too. He was so imitated when I was a kid, from the song The Monster Mash and all that. It was more that imitation that I was doing here."
It works so well within the wacky context of this high concept sequel that it's easy to assume that a Karloff homage was the plan from the start, but Azaria explains that was not the case.
"We knew he would have an English accent because he's the brother of Ahkmenrah from the first movie. Kind of bold and aristocratic is how we started, sort of laid back and bored. We did the table reading that way and then the head of the studio actually came up with the idea.
"He said 'you're a voice guy, can't we push it a little?'. I went for a wardrobe test and while there, getting the costume on film we tried four or five different versions of the character, really weird versions. And at the last minute I went 'what about Karloff, he was a Mummy,' and did it as a joke really.
"Ben laughed and said that's what's what we should go with. It made sense to me, because trying to be scary the way Karloff was scary is pretty antiquated now, which was sort of correct for this character. When you say ‘I was dead,’ that was scary in 1932 but it’s not so scary now. So that’s how we ended up there.”
The 45 year old character actor is, of course, so much more than a succession of funny voices. Indeed these days he reckons he can’t even be guaranteed to come up with anything too original, such are the demands of his day job.
"I've used them all up on The Simpsons," he smiles, "so everything I've done or can possibly do, any voice, any noise I can make has been used. Even Karloff, I had never done it on the Simpsons and then this past Halloween episode we did a Lugosi-Karloff take-off, so I ended up using Karloff for The Simpsons too."
The gift of mimicry has been the starting point for many comedy greats, one of the best being Peter Sellers who, beset by other demons, craved acceptance as a legitimate actor. Azaria has played straight dramatic roles on stage as well as screen, but gives every impression that he’s happy with his lot - not least in the financial security that comes with being a regular cast member on The Simpsons.
"It's now so much money, to put it bluntly, that I don’t have to do anything else if I don’t want to," he nods, "which is fantastic. It's not like I'm offered everything under the sun but I can pick and choose what I'd like to do, which is great."
The man who cites cartoon voiceover artist Mel Blanc as a hero must be aware that he is the unwitting hero to so many young fans of his own television work. The longest running sitcom (animated or not) in American history, it remains wonderfully entertaining and still has potential for further movie incarnations following its 2007 hit.
"We're in the middle of recording our 21st year, we'll definitely record through season 22, I know that, and we're contracted at least to do one more year but I don’t know, they haven't officially picked it up. But literally, there's no reason for it to stop.
"I know for the writers the work never ends, a script is always in some state of development and they never stop rewriting. But I do an hour on a Thursday, where we read the script, and about four hours on Monday where we record an original episode.
"And then about another once or twice a week I’ll come in for an hour. So it's just six or seven hours a week. Which is ridiculous. You have to be able to do all the voices, that's what you have to remind people, but I think it's the best job in the world."
ANWAR BRETT
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