Ben Whitehead on replacing Peter Sallis in Wallace & Gromit: 'The key is not to be jarring'
Whitehead spoke in the latest issue of Radio Times magazine about playing Wallace in Vengeance Most Fowl.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
"Never, ever reach for the Wensleydale before going into a recording session," says Ben Whitehead. "Cheese is literally the worst thing to eat, it’s the claggiest thing you can put in your mouth."
Whitehead should know. The 49-year-old actor is the voice of Wallace, the nation’s favourite cheese-loving inventor, who millions of us will hear this Christmas in the latest of Nick Park and Aardman Animations’ stop-motion escapades.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl features the return of villainous penguin Feathers McGraw. Things get sticky for our plasticine heroes in an adventure which, as ever, tests Wallace’s mechanical ingenuity and Gromit’s patience. "I’ll be honest," says Whitehead, "my excitement levels in the recording room have been problematic."
Born in Cheshire but moving to the South East in childhood, Whitehead has been working on the voice of Wallace for a long time. "I was 14 when A Grand Day Out came out in 1989," he says. "I was a huge fan and did a Wallace voice to entertain people. Not in my wildest dreams did I think that one day I’d 'be' him."
In A Grand Day Out, the voice of Wallace was provided by Peter Sallis, as it was in the sequels The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave and the feature film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
From the very beginning, when Wallace and Gromit were his project while at the National Film and Television School, creator Nick Park thought the voice Sallis employed as Norman Clegg in the Holmfirth-set sitcom Last of the Summer Wine would be perfect for Wallace.
The young Park wrote to Sallis in 1983 asking if he would do it. To his surprise, Sallis agreed. "He’d always had Peter in mind," says Whitehead. "He was the voice in his head."
Whitehead entered the Wallace & Gromit world 20 years later, employed to read lines in auditions at the Bristol studios. By 2005, he had become Sallis’s understudy in Were-Rabbit.
"I was complete nervousness when I first met Peter. In Were-Rabbit, Helena Bonham Carter played Lady Campanula Tottington and Peter chastised me when her cardigan fell off the studio chair and I didn’t notice. 'Why didn’t you pick it up?' 'I’m scared, Peter! I’m with two great actors here. I don’t know what to do!'"
By 2008 and A Matter of Loaf and Death, Sallis was in his late 80s and suffering from macular degeneration, so Whitehead slipped on the knitted green tank top full-time. How did he approach the handover? "The important thing is not to be jarring, so people don’t hear a completely different voice."
Wallace, like Park, is from Lancashire but, as Whitehead observes, Sallis didn’t play it with a textbook northern accent. "Peter was from north London," he says. "It’s an irony that, late in life, he became well-known for two roles set in the North."
It has recently been announced that one of the most recognisable of northern voices, the late Michael Parkinson’s, is going to be re-created by AI for a podcast. Does that concern Whitehead?
"We have a great line in the film about AI, and I can see it will change voice acting. But Aardman doesn’t seem like a company that would employ it; they need to work with actual human voices. I think, ultimately, everyone will want the lengthy, painstaking, hard-working graft of a Wallace & Gromit film. You certainly can’t replace it with a computer at the moment. Who would want to? And Michael Parkinson AI? I just don’t see that. Though he did have a lovely Yorkshire voice."
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If that seems an excessive endorsement of Yorkshire from a man who plays our favourite on-screen Lancastrian, there might be a reason. "My dad’s from Yorkshire," says Whitehead.
"I recently took him and Mum to York, and he said, 'Let’s go to Holmfirth.' So we stopped at the graveyard where Peter is buried, next to [Last of the Summer Wine co-star] Bill Owen, and I paid my respects. On Peter’s gravestone it says, 'Star of Last of the Summer Wine and Wallace & Gromit.' That’s how much it meant to him."
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Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl comes to BBC One and iPlayer on Christmas Day.
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