Billy West: the most credited actor you’ve never seen in a movie
It wasn’t until the early 1990s that the industry began to increasingly rely on celebrities and established stars to fulfil voice-only roles, but actor Billy West both predated that bandwagon and managed to continue his prolific volume of output ever since.
The finger of blame regularly tends to be pointed in the direction of Robin Williams, who gave one of the best voiceover performances in film history in Disney’s classic Aladdin, and ever since that moment major studios have tended to leave proven voice actors on the outside looking in when it comes to the highest-profile projects.
However, everyone to have watched an animated TV show or feature in the last 30 years has undoubtedly heard West on at least a handful of occasions, with the performer lending his talents to a mind-blowing array of instantly recognisable figures in almost 300 different roles covering screens big and small, as well as video games and commercials.
The best-known is arguably Futurama protagonist Philip J. Fry, although he also voices Professor Farnsworth, Doctor Zoidberg, and Zapp Brannigan, to name just a few of his contributions to The Simpsons creator Matt Groening’s long-running sci-fi favourite.
West has also followed in the footsteps of the legendary Mel Blanc in more ways than one by voicing Bugs Bunny in Space Jam and other assorted projects, while some of the other animated household favourites he’s supplied his elastic tones to include Elmer Fudd, Popeye, Shaggy Rogers of Scooby-Doo fame, Marvel’s Rocket Raccoon, Dick Dastardly’s canine sidekick Muttley, and Woody Woodpecker.
It’s kept him gainfully employed for decades, but West knows that specialised voiceover artists continue to be overlooked and often ignored by Hollywood’s biggest players, outlining his frustrations to KPBS about how the people who’ve dedicated his careers to the craft aren’t even part of the conversation at times.
“It’s been co-opted by Hollywood. They won’t even let voiceover people in them, they want to have celebrities, which is unfortunate because we spend our lives being artists and crafting a voice of any nature whether it’s genderless, or one gender or the other to do it all,” he said. “You could create monstrous voices, you could do little pixies, whatever you were assigned to do, you could carry it off and then some, but we don’t have the luxury of coming in with just our own voice and just be able to skate through.”
Despite that, West remains one of the most renowned and constantly in-demand voice actors the business has at its disposal, even if he’d be the first to admit that breaking in and building a name is a lot more difficult than it was in the 1980s when he was first starting out in the pre-celebrity age, where talent always came first instead of name value.
