Worlds collide! It makes a lot of sense that, when the time comes to cast a voice actor to make your gibbering creatures come to life, you’d go to someone with a lot of gibbering experience.
Enter Mike Patton, who, we’re now told, voiced the creatures crawling around New York in I Am Legend. (Note that the press release specifically said ‘creatures’ rather than ‘vampires’ or ‘wellness gurus’.) This sort of thing doesn’t happen often enough, though I still get a kick out of knowing that Einsturzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld probably still gets residual checks from howling into one of Stephen Sommers’ mics for The Mummy. I do, however, hope that Francis Lawrence had some specific notes for Patton, who’s perfectly willing to phone it in given the opportunity. Just see his voice work in The Darkness video game, which occasionally sounded like a Patton fan club submission. (Patton’s Portal cameo was better.)
If nothing else, there’s always Bionic Commando to look forward to — he’ll be voicing the lead in that one, too.
Patton is also reportedly scoring a short film called A Perfect Place, directed by Derrick Scoccera, of the boutique DVD label Fantoma Films.