RICK AND MORTY Creators Talk About the Daunting Task of Replacing Justin Roiland

Rick and Morty returned this week for a 7th season, and it’s the show’s first without co-creator Justin Roiland, who voiced the two main characters of the show, as well as others, before being fired amid many troubling allegations. The series showrunner, Scott Marder, and remaining co-creator Dan Harmon, were left with the decision of whether or not to cancel or press on, and when they decided to keep the show going, they were faced with the daunting task of finding voices for their well-known leading characters, and it was no easy fete.

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the pair talked about the long road they traveled to hiring actors Ian Cardoni as Rick and Harry Belden as Morty.

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

“I did. There were different schools of thought. For sheer quality of life, it’d be easier for the amount of work required for both characters. We watched it over the years wear down on Roiland’s voice. It felt unfair to do 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 weird way, catering to the idea that there’s been a replacement of a single human being — an auteur — is going to play into the disruption factor. We really want people to keep believing these characters are real.” 

When asked how intensive the search was, and how many voice actors they heard in the process, Marder said:

“We heard thousands. It went on for six months. It was really wide. It almost went so wide that we debated doing a global hotline, though we knew it would wind up being a prank line. We felt like we needed to go that far and wide. It was harder than we thought. I thought it’d have been easier. Rick was a lot harder than I expected; everyone sounded like Macho Man Randy Savage or like a cousin of his. No one sounded exactly like Rick. It was tricky. People had it in splashes but once you bring them back in, they couldn’t do it conversationally, which is what we needed. It was exhaustive.”

Harmon added:

“It’s one thing to match an impression — can you do George W. Bush as well as Dana Carvey, but can you then do it if you’re not saying, “Not gonna do it.” It was trying to strike this crazy balance; this character has to be angry, sad, despondent and all those things.”

Marder talked about the process of whittling down to the final choices:

“Thousands came through that got whittled down to hundreds who made it to us. We looked far and wide. If the perfect Morty lived in Norway, we were going to figure out how to work with the horrible time gap. We were trying to be open-minded. The high-class problem that Harmon and I had was that we were writing season nine — seasons beyond where we’re at right now. So it didn’t feel like the tone for the show could magically change. We wrote consistently the same show, and we needed the voices to be the same.”

Harmon added:

“I was removed from it until the late 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 very quickly get so confused when you’re trying to tell the difference between a 9.5 and a 9.7 on a “Does this sound like my friend?” scale. You so quickly lose your objectivity. I got to be a little baby and do even less work than Scott, but I can’t stress enough: This isn’t the job he signed up for, and yet he did it, exhaustively, and with a lot of support. And he did an amazing job.”

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

“I didn’t want to even know their names. These guys would keep me blind in strategic ways. They were using me as a contestant on Is It Cake? to test the foolproof-ness of this. There was a blind process, where for all I knew I was saying my favorite Rick is a different person than my favorite Morty. It was a very mindful process. I can’t answer the question about what I liked about their reads other than that they sounded the most like the characters moving on and staying alive to me. I did meet both of these kids at a Dodgers game when we were celebrating wrapping the season, and I couldn’t believe how young they were. I can’t imagine what it’s like for them to be wandering into this gig.”

Marder added:

“They feel like they just won the lottery. They just bought this show 30 more years. We just got these eager young guys who are so excited to attack every episode.” 

Harmon went on to say:

“Now that they’ve got the job, I can say that I like that they’re already willing to work very hard because that’s always going to be a requirement in recording these voices. We tend to develop these stories on the fly, and dialogue gets rewritten and needs to be rerecorded as we’re audio mixing and stuff like that.”

Marder concluded:

“They have access to all the cuts we have access to. So when I jump in to record new stuff with them, these guys are diligent and have watched things through and they’re asking to record pickups for things that aren’t on our list. If they think they can do better with their work — we’re not even flagging it! — go for it. They’ve got fresh legs, and it feels like new energy coming from each of them.”

The response from fans has been a mixed bag, with a lot of unsurprising complaints. People don’t like change, but hopefully they like the show enough to return, and they’ll get used to the voices of the new actors, who love the series as much as the fans do.

Catch new episodes of Rick and Morty on Adult Swim on Sundays.