SOUTH PARK is about to kick off its 21st season this fall, and in that time co-creator Trey Parker has been nominated for an Oscar (Best Original Song for SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT), directed the action-satire TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE and taken Broadway by storm with Book of Mormon. Parker is known for directing, producing, writing, and with SOUTH PARK, doing voices for all his work. However, the man had to take on the sole role of an actor for DESPICABLE ME 3, a gig he’s been waiting for almost twenty years.
Parker recently spoke with EW about his role as the villain Balthazar Bratt in the upcoming animated sequel, and he mentioned how in all his years in the voice acting business this was the first time someone’s ever asked him to work on their project:
This was, believe it or not, the very first pitch I ever got. My instinct is usually “F@ck no, I do my own shit,” but when I got it, I was actually really flattered. I was like, “Wow, someone actually asked me to do something.” And also I was kind of like, “Well, why the f@ck has no one ever asked me to do this before?”
The only other acting role Parker has done outside of his own work was the David Zucker film BASEKETBALL, which he did in 1998 alongside his friend and SOUTH PARK co-creator Matt Stone. But Parker understands why the likes of Pixar and Disney haven’t called him up in the last twenty years, what with SOUTH PARK being as massive (and delightfully flithy) as it is:
For a while I thought, you take a kids’ movie and you throw Trey Parker up there and maybe some adults go “nuh-uh.” But also, I do every voice I could possibly do on SOUTH PARK, so it’s not like you can say, “Hey, come do some new character for us.” Until this offer came in, I hadn’t really thought about it that it’s the first time anybody’s ever asked me to do something like this.
As for the vocal creation of Bratt, Parker saw a kinship with his own PARK creation, Randy Marsh. The characters look pretty similar, but Parker was able to work in other inspirations in order to flesh the character out:
Bratt looks a bit like Stan’s dad, although the difference to me is that Randy is a big f@ck up but has a big heart, and Bratt doesn’t. But Randy’s voice is just kind of my voice anyway, so I worked on it enough so that it didn’t sound exactly like Randy and was his own thing. The other thing I thought of when I saw the character was Kirk Cameron—a guy who obviously was the s— in the 80s and then went crazy and turned to religion. I wanted Bratt’s voice to be somewhat generic, because Illumination is so much about the visual of things that if you add too zany of a voice, it starts to become overly cartoony.
I was surprised as anyone to hear Parker had been cast in this massive kids movie, not only because his show is so famously crass, but because he's spent his whole career working on his own projects. Doing something so large under the direction of someone else never seemed to be his bag, but it's understandable that he would want to branch out and take on something that allowed him to utilize his skills without the pressures of writing and directing. If I see this movie it will be because of him, as I think his voiceover work on SOUTH PARK is among the best in the biz. Plus, who doesn't want him to see him mock someone like Kirk Cameron?
DESPICABLE ME 3 hits theaters June 30.