Kevin Michael Richardson has, like many successful voice actors, a lot of voices inside of him. Getting his start in the early 1990s, he’s played dozens of voice roles for animation as well as live-action roles and now most prominently can be heard as the voice of Cleveland Jr. on Fox’s The Cleveland Show.
It’s a role that developed in an organic way, says Richardson, who originally came in for the role of the redneck Lester, which he also voices for the show.
‘My idea of Cleveland Jr. was completely different from what they wanted,’ he says of his first shot at the character. After about a half hour of discussing the character with executive producers Mike Henry and Seth MacFarlane, they hit on the breakthrough moment.
‘Seth and Mike said, ‘Just picture Cleveland Sr. as a 12- or 14-year-old boy and what would he sound like,” says Richardson, who ended up mixing that idea with a character he played on the first season of ER named Patrick. ‘He was mentally challenged, he had a football helmet on and he was kind of like this stumbling boy man. And I used that voice and kind of joined it with Cleveland Sr. as a kid, and we came up with Cleveland Jr.’
A visual of the character also helped Richardson connect with the character. ‘I saw him and I was kind of scared because I think I have a photo of me when I was young that kind of looked like that, but I didn’t want to say anything at the time.’
With the series wrapping its first season and already picked up for a third, Richardson says the character has remained essentially unchanged from the original concept. Most of the time, Richardson says he’s recording his lines on his own, working with executive producers Rich Appel and Mike Henry. Occasionally, Henry ‘ the voice of Cleveland Sr. ‘ will join Richardson in the booth and they’ll record lines together. And Richardson did get to share the booth with music star Kanye West for an episode in which Cleveland Jr. did a rap-off with a character named Kenny West.
The most pressure usually comes at the table read, Richardson says. ‘The table read is usually when you have the entire cast there and the guest cast there. You have the executive producers, the director, the network, the writers, the cast,’ he says. ‘It’s a not-very-large room full of about 80 to 100 people, and so the tension is high and the performance level is up because you want to make everybody laugh.’
As is typical for primetime series, it takes between nine months and a year between recording his lines for the show and the finished product hitting the air.
But Richardson says his favorite role was that of The Joker on The Batman series that ran on Kids WB from 2004 to 2008. ‘I know Mark Hamill did it before me, but I loved playing The Joker,’ he says. Richardson was nominated for two Daytime Emmys as Outstanding Performer in an Animated Series for his work on The Batman.
In addition to Cleveland Jr. and Lester, Richardson’s current voice roles include Maurice on The Penguins of Madagascar, Principal Lewis on American Dad!, the villain Black Manta on Batman: Brave and the Bold, and also a role on the upcoming Nicktoons series Zevo-3.
His advice for success as an animation voice actor? ‘The trick is to paint the picture with your voice,’ he says. ‘And have fun.’
