“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” delighted fans in the weeks leading up to release by dropping two casting bombshells: Donald Glover is voicing Yoshi and Glen Powell is voicing Fox McCloud. It turns out both actors pitched themselves for these roles, directly calling up Illumination after the $1.3 billion success of “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.”
“When we were working on the first movie, we began to get phone calls from actors,” Illumination boss Chris Meledandri told Forbes ahead of the sequel’s theatrical release. “They started communicating their enthusiasm. After the first movie was done, there were two phone calls that came from actors expressing incredible conviction and passion about being involved with Nintendo, and one of them was from Glen Powell. He explained that we had to understand how deeply he loved the character of Fox McCloud. His dream was one day to be part of a ‘Star Fox’ movie. I’m listening to this going, ‘He has no idea that Miyamoto-san and I are talking about Star Fox being in this new movie,’ and Glen is expressing this passion for this.”
Nintendo boss Shigeru Miyamoto told Forbes that it was the Illumination team who first proposed adding Star Fox to the sequel, which by then all parties involved knew would be taking on the “Super Mario Galaxy” video game.
“When I got the proposal from Chris about including ‘Star Fox,’ in general, from Nintendo’s perspective, we tend to avoid mixing IPs,” Miyamoto said. “With that said, though, as the creator of Star Fox and this movie taking place in space, I felt that I wanted to see that. I wanted to see what it would be like, but I also felt that there may be significant resistance internally about that idea, so after I got this proposal, I contacted the necessary parties involved and started my lobbying activity here at Nintendo. I was surprised to find that a lot of people saw a lot of potential with it and were really excited to see what would come out of this.”
Powell’s phone call pitch to voice Fox McCloud arrived around the same time, which seemed like fate for Meledandri. The character is the protagonist of the “Star Fox” video games and is one of the original characters of Nintendo’s fighting game “Super Smash Bros.”
“The other actor who called after seeing the first movie was Donald Glover, and he was like, ‘I need to be involved, if there’s any way with a Nintendo movie,’” Meledandri continued. “We loved him as an actor and a creator, as well as a filmmaker, and so he came in, and we sat down, and he said, ‘I will do the most incredible Yoshi.’ So it was really interesting that these two casting ideas came from the actors themselves.”
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is now playing in theaters nationwide.
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