While Chris Diamantopoulos is currently playing a mobster Sticky, he also lends his voice to a very famous children’s icon: Mickey Mouse.
Actor, known for his work on Office and Silicon Valleyhe is also a voice actor with many credits including the 2013-2019 animated series Mickey Mouse and its continuation in 2020-2023. The wonderful world of Mickey Mouse.
Diamantopoulos, 49, says it’s surreal to know he’s one of only five people in Disney’s 101-year history to voice the brand’s official mascot. (Several others subscribed or briefly voiced Mickey.)
“That’s so weird. I mean, honestly, there’s a lot of things in my career that if you’d told me when I was a kid that I’d be doing, I might have kind of thought, ‘Wow, I could see that,'” he says. But playing Mickey Mouse was “mass left turn”.
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“It’s humbling because I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants,” he adds. “I feel incredibly lucky. I’m a really, really lucky guy.”
“I barely finished high school, and for me to be the fifth voice in history after Walt [Disney]to voice Mickey Mouse, I wear it as a badge of honor,” he says. Other longtime Mickeys included Disney, Wayne Allwine, Bret Iwan and Les Perkins.
“The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse”.
Disney
Diamantopoulos credits “brilliant” animator Paul Rudish and all of Disney’s writing and animation team for Mickey’s relentless appeal. “The voice is Mickey. But the facial expressions you see Mickey make… that’s all thanks to the brilliant talent of these hard-working and under-heralded writers and animators.”
“There’s something about this incarnation of Mickey that I think is the freest Mickey,” he adds.
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In addition to voicing Mickey for TV, he also speaks and sings as Mickey for Disneyland’s Mickey’s Magic Railway, the park’s first ride centered around the mascot. “It was so much fun,” he says.
It is especially cute because he can take his children with him when they go to the park. Diamantopoulos and his wife Becki Newton have one son and three daughters. “I can take my kids on this ride where they hear my voice and see me and I take them through it,” he says. “Can you even imagine what that dream is like?”
“Every time I get to voice Mickey, it reminds me why I got into this business: for the magic, that intangible, beautiful feeling we get when we enter the world of imagination.”
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Chris Diamantopoulos in “The Sticky”.
Jan Thijs
His latest project, Stickyfulfills that dream in a very different way.
The new Prime Video series follows Diamantopoulos’ mobster Mike Byrne, Margo Martindale’s maple syrup farmer Ruth Landry and Guillaume Cyr’s security guard Remy Bouchard as they team up to pull off a multi-million dollar heist of Quebec’s surplus maple syrup.
“We all want to watch something that excites us,” he says. Sticky is “it’s going to take them, and it’s going to take them to a place that makes them go, ‘What on earth did I just watch?'”
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Sticky season 1 is now available to stream on Prime Video.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education