For 31 years, actor Harry Shearer provided Dr. Julius Hibbert’s voice in The Simpsons. But that sequence came to an end with last Sunday’s episode, “DiaryQueen”. As promised last summer, the show’s producers hired a Black actor to replace Shearer and voice the Black character.
Vulture reports that Harry Shearer’s term as Dr. Hibbert has ended. Starting with next weekend’s episode, “Wad Goals”, the character will now be voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson, who voiced Goro in 1995 Mortal combat film and has since acted on hundreds of television episodes on shows like Pinky and the brain, Static Shock, Teen Titans, Star Wars Clone Wars, The Boondocks, and F is for family, just to name a few. He is also a veteran of The Simpsons, having lent his voice to characters like Anger Watkins, Jimi Hendrix, Dave Chappelle and many more since 2009, so this is familiar territory for him. (Shearer, of course, is still involved with the series – he voices characters like Mr. Burns, Waylon Smithers, Principal Skinner, Ned Flanders, Reverend Lovejoy, Kent Brockman and others.)
After Hank Azaria moved away from the role of convenience store owner Apu in The Simpsons last year, producers decided to change their policy on voice actors by playing certain roles. “Moving on, The Simpsons there will no longer be white actors voicing non-white characters, ”they said. This cast switch is the latest example of producers following this promise, albeit belatedly: The Hollywood Reporter points out that Richardson’s cast follows Alex Désert being brought in to play Homer Simpson’s co-worker Carl Carlson, previously voiced by Azaria, and Jenny Yokobori taking over as the wife of the Comic Book Guy, Kumiko Albertson, who was previously voiced by Tress MacNeille.
This is part of a broader and long-needed movement towards the accurate representation that is taking place in the world of animation. Last year, white actor Mike Henry moved away from the role of black character Cleveland Brown in Family man (Arif Zahir ended up being cast for this role), and both from Netflix Big mouth and AppleTV + ‘s central Park decided to change his cast to give people of color the opportunity to give voice to characters of color on these shows.
Richardson won two Daytime Emmy nominations for his work as the Joker in Batman, an animated series that aired in the mid-2000s. If he can win an award for incorporating such an iconic character as the Joker (and who had such a remarkable performance by Mark Hamill years ago in Batman: the animated series), he will do very well playing Dr. Hibbert in The Simpsons.
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