ANIMAG TALKS WITH BILLY WEST FROM FUTURAMA

A little more than a week ago, Animation Magazine had a chance to talk to the awesome Billy West about all sorts of things like the new season of Futurama, how he landed the gig playing Fry, and a really great bit on how he got into voice acting. In this excerpt, Billy talks about how he got the Fry gig:

How did you end up getting cast as Fry on the show?

West:  When they announced that they were doing the show, my agent sent me in. I was lucky because they were fans of mine from my Ren & Stimpy days. Matt Groening knew my work. So they had me sitting down and auditioning with the pictures of the characters. I even auditioned for Bender. There were about 200 people reading for them at the office over at Fox. A couple of days later, I got the parts of Zoidberg and the Professor. I actually wasn’t originally hired to do Fry. Also, Phil Hartman was originally cast as Zapp Brannigan, but when he died, they asked me if I wanted to give it a whirl. We both loved doing the voices of these big dumb announcers who sound really pompous and try to be authoritative.

You can check out the rest of the article here, and remember Futurama is all new this Wednesday Night on Comedy Central!