Nintendo fans were surprised to learn in recent weeks that Glen Powell and Donald Glover would both be part of “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” voicing iconic video game characters Fox McCloud and Yoshi, respectively.
As it turns out, Illumination CEO Chris Meledandri was also surprised these A-listers were gunning for these roles.
“When we were working on the first movie, we began to get phone calls from actors. They started communicating their enthusiasm,” Meledandri told Forbes. “After the first movie was done, there were two phone calls that came from actors expressing incredible conviction and passion about being involved with Nintendo.”
One of those calls came from Glover, who surprised fans on March 9 with the news that he was playing Mario’s green dino sidekick. The news particularly came as a shock considering all of Yoshi’s dialog in trailers thus far has been squeaks, repeating his name and other Yoshi noises.
“He was like, ‘I need to be involved, if there’s any way with a Nintendo movie.’ We loved him as an actor and a creator, as well as a filmmaker, and so he came in, and we sat down, and he said, ‘I will do the most incredible Yoshi,’” Meledandri said. “So it was really interesting that these two casting ideas came from the actors themselves.”
While Glover said he was content in being involved at any level in a Nintendo movie, Powell was gunning for a specific character: the outer-space animal aviator Fox McCloud.
“His dream was one day to be part of a Star Fox movie,” Meledandir said. “I’m listening to this going, ‘he has no idea that Miyamoto-san and I are talking about Star Fox being in this new movie,’ and Glen is expressing this passion for this.”
Powell’s casting reveal was even more recent than Glover’s, with fans only learning that Star Fox was in the movie on March 26. Though Star Fox exists in his own video game franchise outside of Mario’s, it’s not too hard to imagine the space-bound character bumping into the Mushroom Kingdom heroes in a “Mario Galaxy” film.
“What happened was that after we spoke about it, we had decided we wanted Star Fox to appear in this new movie as a surprise. When I called Glen back, I said, ‘Look, I want you to have a conversation, but it has to be completely secret, you cannot talk it to anyone’, as no one knew this character would be so close to this movie,” Meledandir said. “On top of that, we felt that there was a Glen Powell kind of attitude to the character, and he feels perfectly suited to that role. It was one of those gifts.”
