Oh snap! Last week we reported to you a trusted scooper had told us that Laurence Fishburne would be doing the voice of Galactus in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. It turns out that our scooper was half right – Fishburne is doing a voice in the film… but it’s Silver Surfer.
This is a bummer for Doug Jones, the guy under the CGI exterior of the Surfer. Doug’s been a creature actor for a while, and he’s really wanted to do more of his own voice work, especially on this film. There was some back and forth on whether they would keep Jones’ recorded dialogue during interactions with the other actors, but I guess they chose to go another way.
The good news for Jones is that he’s now the voice of Abe Sapien in all the Hellboy cartoons and games (and I think quite possibly Hellboy 2: The Golden Army)*. And Fishburne as Surfer is in no way bad news for fans, although if there’s a repeat of the ‘Kingpin isn’t black!’ argument with this bit of voice casting, I’m gonna record a bunch of video tapes and send them to NBC.
*Russ’ edit: He told us not long ago that he is…as long as that doesn’t change.