The creators of RICK AND MORTY talk about the daunting task of replacing Justin Roiland

Rick and Morty returned this week for a seventh season, and it’s the show’s first without a co-creator Justin Roiland, who voiced the show’s two main characters, as well as others, before being fired amid many troubling allegations. The showrunner of the series, Scott Marderand remaining co-creator Dan Harmonthey were left with the decision of whether or not to cancel or continue, and when they decided to continue the show, they were faced with the daunting task of finding voices for their famous main characters, and it wasn’t an easy party. .

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the couple talked about the long road they’ve come to hiring actors Ian Cardoni like Rick e Harry Belden as Morty.

When asked if they knew from the beginning that they wanted to hire two actors in Roiland’s place, Marder responded:

“I did. There were different schools of thought. For sheer quality of life, it would be easier because of the amount of work required for both characters. We’ve seen it over the years wear on Roiland’s voice. It seemed to me It’s unfair to do something like that to someone.”

Harmon added:

“In retrospect, it’s also smart because we want the fan experience to continue with as little disruption as possible. In a strange way, catering to the idea that there has been a replacement of a single human being – an author – will play a disturbing role. We really want people to continue to believe that these characters are real.”

When asked how intense the search was and how many voice actors they listened to during the process, Marder said:

“We’ve heard thousands of them. She went on for six months. It was really wide. The issue has become so big that we thought about creating a global hotline, even though we knew it would become a joke line. We felt the need to go so far and wide. It was harder than we thought. I thought it would be easier. Rick was much harder than I expected; they all looked like Macho Man Randy Savage or like his cousins. No one looked exactly like Rick. It was complicated. People had it in flashes, but once they brought it back in, they couldn’t do it in a conversational way, which is what we needed. It was exhaustive.”

Harmon added:

“It’s one thing to match an impression: You can do George W. Bush as well as Dana Carvey, but you can do it if you don’t say, ‘I won’t do it.’” He was trying to achieve this crazy balance; this character has to be angry, sad, knocked down and all that stuff.

Marder talked about the process of reducing final choices:

“Thousands of people came and then it dwindled down to hundreds coming to us. We looked far and wide. If the perfect Morty lived in Norway, we would have figured out how to handle the horrible time lapse. We were trying to be open minded. The high-level problem that Harmon and I had was that we were writing season nine, seasons beyond where we are now. So it didn’t feel like the tone of the show could magically change. We consistently wrote the same show and needed the voices to be the same.

Harmon added:

“I was left out of it until the final stages – and part of that was a selfish emotional conflict on my part – but it ended up helping us because of the scientific practicality of the process. It was very difficult, even in my short time at the end of this assembly line, where your ears get confused very quickly when you try to distinguish between a 9.5 and a 9.7 on a “Sounds like my friend? ” ?” stairs. You lose your objectivity so quickly. I must be a little kid and do even less work than Scott, but I can’t stress this enough: this is not the job he signed up for, and yet he did it, thoroughly and with lots of support. And he did an extraordinary job”.

Harmon went on to talk about what ultimately made the newcomers, Cardoni and Belden, right for the job:

“I didn’t even want to know their names. These guys would strategically keep me blind. They were using me as a contestant on Is It Cake? to test the infallibility of this. There was a blind process, where for all I knew I was saying that my favorite Rick is a different person than my favorite Morty. It was a very conscious process. I can’t answer the question of what I liked about their readings, other than that they felt more like the characters moved on and stayed alive. I met both of these guys at a Dodgers game while we were celebrating the end of the season, and I couldn’t believe how young they were. I can’t imagine what it means for them to wander into this concert.

Marder added:

“They feel like they just won the lottery. They just bought this show for another 30 years. We just had these enthusiastic young guys who are so excited to attack every episode.

Harmon went on to say:

“Now that they got the job, I can say that I like the fact that they are already willing to work very hard because that will always be a requirement to record these voices. We tend to develop these stories on the fly, and the dialogue gets rewritten and has to be rerecorded while we’re mixing the audio and things like that.”

Marder concluded:

“They have access to all the cuts we have access to. So when I come in to record new material with them, these guys are diligent and have looked at everything and ask me to record takes for things that aren’t on our list. If they think they can do better at their job, we don’t even report it! – Just do it. They have fresh legs and it seems like a new energy comes from each of them.

Fan response has been mixed, with many unsurprising complaints. People don’t like the change, but hopefully they’ll like it enough to come back, and they’ll get used to the voices of the new actors, who love the series as much as the fans.

Catch new episodes of Rick and Morty on adult swimming on Sundays.