My interview with Raymond Persi took place at the Disney Toon Studios in Glendale, CA. It was one of the coolest experiences in my blogging life, and that says a lot coming from someone who travels the world for a living. This was no ordinary interview.We got to have a little fun with this one, and who doesn’t love fun right?
Apart from having already spent the morning with Zootopia filmmakers; Directors Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Producer Clark Spencer (not to mention getting a cool drawing lesson from Byron himself), I had already consumed The Big Donut. My day could have ended right there and I would have been quite pleased.
Instead, I got to sit down with voice actor Raymond Persi and talk about being Flash, one of the most notorious characters from the new Zootopia film.
But it gets even better. After talking to Raymond, I had the chance to sit in the studio with Flash (and Raymond of course) himself to ask him a very, very important question. And Disney was cool enough to film it so I could share it with you!
Totally.
Flippin.
Sweet.
My Interview with Raymond Persi Voice Actor of Flash
We sat in a low-lit, small studio room where it really felt more like a chat over donuts and coffee than an interview. Raymond talked about the story process for Zootopia, growing up near Disney and how he got to work on the film.
On Growing Up Near Disney
I was raised in the hills above Disney, so it was really cool for me because I got to see it all the time and I even watched when they were building some of the buildings when I was a kid. What was great was, eventually, I got to work here.
On Getting to Work on Zootopia
I used to, before coming here, be a director on The Simpsons. When Rich Moore came here to direct Wreck It Ralph, he brought a few of us over that were directors on The Simpsons to mix with the story artists here to see what would come of it.
I started as a story artist on Wreck It Ralph after that, I went on to Frozen, then I worked on two short films, Get A Horse with Mickey Mouse and Feast. I eventually worked with Rich Moore and producer Clark Spencer as the voice of Flash in Zootopia.
On Getting Into Voice Acting
Just to tell you how it happened for me, basically, what happens is a lot of times when we are creating our rough versions of the films just to sort of test it, we don’t really know who’s going to be cast yet. We don’t even know if sometimes characters are going to stay in the film, so they’ll bring in a lot of artists and other people from work to come, they’ll say, “Come in the recording room. We need you to do some scratch.”
You might be at your desk working, all of a sudden it’s like, “Be a gorilla now!” So every now and then they like what the voice sounds like and they’ll stick it in there.
In my particular case, I get to be that little annoying brat Gene from Wreck It Ralph and then the zombie from Wreck It Ralph.
In Get a Horse I was another little annoying character, the horn. What was cool was I got be horse, horse collar in doing a couple little laughs here and there and what was fun was, you know, they got Walt Disney to do the, the voice.
They used old audio of Walt Disney as Mickey Mouse for that short, so it was fun. I got to share a laugh with Walt Disney. That was kind of neat.
For Frozen, one thing was cool was that I just had one little line in there, but the guy talking, his wife calls after him and she says, “Faster, Persi!” So they used my last name which is kind of fun little treat for me.
Then for Feast, I didn’t do any voice work in it, but my dogs did. I have four little Boston Terriers, so we brought them in and we gave them food.
We made them grunt so we could use their little voices for the dog in Feast.