Up Till Now: The Autobiography

done—although I did do all my own stunts. Since then I’ve done several major animated theatrical movies. I’ve always done it alone, without any other actors being present. When we were doing the animated Star Trek the director and the sound technicians would come to the set wherever I was working and between scenes we’d go into a bathroom and record my part. Apparently the acoustics in a bathroom are particularly good—and for obvious reasons bathrooms generally have thicker walls.
    For movies like Over the Hedge and The Wild I did go into a soundproof booth to read my role. I don’t know why voice-over actors work alone, but that’s the way it’s done. At first, someone read the lines with me, but after a point I started hearing them in my head and simply responded out loud.
    It’s not as easy as it sounds. There are as many as fifteen technicians working with me in the room, and all of them have an opinion about my reading. There is no right or wrong way to do a reading, just opinions. Endless opinions. In The Wild I played an egotistical wildebeest who wanted to become a predator—and who had a real passion for choreography. After one take I remember one of the techs telling me gently, “That just doesn’t sound like a power-crazed wildebeest to me.”
    I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t sound like a wildebeest? I was tempted to tell him that I was playing it as a Canadian wildebeest, which has a much different accent than your normal wildebeest. Instead, I went back in the booth and did my best possible wildebeest.
    Unlike film, which can be expensive, audio tape is very inexpensive. Normally on the first few takes I would be spontaneous, and then I would begin doing variations. Endless variations. Surprisingly, they record the audio first and then draw the animation to fit the voice.
    In Over the Hedge I didn’t work with a wonderful cast that includedBruce Willis, Garry Shandling, Wanda Sykes, Steve Carell, Nick Nolte, and Avril Lavigne. Normally at the end of a picture the entire cast has a party, but when I finished doing my role in this film I popped open a soft drink.
    Not working with your co-stars in a movie is actually quite common. In many of these pictures I appeared in only a few scenes, I’d come in for a few days and do my scenes and leave. If the other actors weren’t in my scenes there would be no reason or opportunity for us to meet. The one person in particular I remember not working with was Ava Gardner. Growing up, I had been in love with Ava Gardner, who was my fantasy of the perfect woman. I didn’t work with her for the first time in my career in The Kidnapping of the President .
    So when we did the animated version of Star Trek I didn’t work with Leonard or any other members of the cast. In fact, they eliminated Chekov from the series because they couldn’t afford to pay Walter Koenig. The scripts were written by many of the same writers who’d done the original episodes and, in fact, some of them were based on those episodes. For example, we had more trouble with tribbles.
    I enjoyed reprising Kirk, perhaps even a little more than I’d expected. He’d been locked away inside me for almost four years, but as soon as I opened my mouth to read his first line he was back. Slipping back into that character was like putting on a comfortable old sweatshirt; it fit. An actor does form a relationship with the characters he or she plays. When I was doing a low-budget movie or a guest-starring appearance on TV there rarely was time to actually get to know the character, it was just a mask I slipped on for a few days and I tried to invest as much humanity as possible into him. But when you’re working on a series for several years, on many levels your character actually does come alive, the character takes on its own emotional life, and you experience the emotions of the story through the prism of that character. You don’t even have to think about it, you just react. On occasion a character will surprise you, and react in an unexpected way. You also get the freedom within theprotection of that character to take actions and behave in ways you never would normally. I liked Kirk. He was a heroic figure, he had a bit of Alexander’s nobility but with a nice sense of irony—and an appreciation of a lovely earthwoman.
    Mr. Spock also became real on some level of my mind. Of course I know Spock is a fictional character, but I’ve known him so well for so long that...