INTERVIEW: John DiMaggio

That’s right boys and girls – Bender the robot from Futurama.

.

There are two things you need to know about John DiMaggio. One – you know when he’s around because suddenly you can hear Bender the robot whistling. And two – if you ever get the opportunity to chat to the former stand-up comedian, prepare yourself for him to do most of the talking and for you to try desperately not to wet yourself laughing. The Void was fortunate to get a little face time with the man behind the shiny metal ass.

“There was a lot of touching myself which I’m not very proud of. It was very difficult, there was a lot of chafing – it sucked.”

The exuberant John DiMaggio has just been explaining what he’s been up to in the four years since Futurama was brutally axed from our screens. While John went off to do other work for Disney, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network, fans of the show were doing everything they could to get it brought back. Add this to the fact that creators Matt Groening and David X. Cohen kept it on the burners and Fox’s corporate bods started to rethink their decision to ditch it.

“It’s funny because I had a feeling we would be able to do something again, I really did,” says John. But rather than bringing back the show for a new series, the team dreamt up four feature-length episodes, starting with Bender’s Big Score. In true Futurama style, the writers have thought up as many off-the-wall storylines they can with Bender being infected with a virus by alien nudists, the secret of time-travel being discovered in a strange place and a whole new reason for Al Gore losing the election to George Bush.

“He must have just laughed pretty hard, it’s silly,” muses John, when asked about Gore’s possible reaction to this particular plotline. Gore’s daughter Kristen writes for the show, hence his long term involvement, but John still gets excited when recounting his first meeting with the former VP.

“I came up to him like ‘um, Mr Vice-President, I’m John DiMaggio, I just wanted to says it’s a pleasure to meet you, I play the voice of Bender on the show’ and he goes ‘I know you…I know you’. And he shakes my hand… I mean it might as well have been John Lennon for crying out loud! I could have been like ‘Oh my God, he touched my hand!’ I mean, forget about it, that was a trip!” he laughs.

It’s very difficult to not get swept up with John’s enthusiasm for a show he so clearly loves. He rattles on cheerfully about his co-stars and the writers he trusts to “bring the funny” and happily chats about anything we ask, such as his beat-boxing (“I didn’t have enough money for a drum-kit!”) doing “duelling Zoidberg” voices with co-star Billy West – in Zoidberg’s voice: “Cardboard? Delicious! And so full of fibre”, plus other voice artists like Frank Welker. “Do you know what he can do? He can do like a flock of birds, an entire flock of birds and one bird will have a cough!”

As for Bender, we’ve had four seasons to develop our love for the alcohol-swilling, porn-loving bending unit and one wonders whether it would be quite the same if the original voice John had in mind had been used. “I auditioned for both the professor and Bender and they had me audition for the professor in the Bender voice, so if you can imagine…”

With that, he adopts the famous voice for the first of several occasions and starts doing the professor’s lines as Bender. And while hearing him do the voice makes us internally squeal with delight, it’s a great relief to think that they went for the casting that they did, with John’s original Bender voice (which sounds like Barry White) being assigned to the character of URL (pronounced like Earl), the robot cop (“Ohhh yeaaahhh, I’m gonna get all 24th century on your ass” John demonstrates).

The Bender we know and love comes from a combination of three things, according to John; the drunk at the end of every bar, Slim Pickens from Blazing Saddles and a character invented by an old college buddy, called Charlie the Sausage lover (the character not the college buddy), which sees John start holding court on sausages in order to demonstrate what is basically Bender’s voice.

But John does have one problem with the show – watching episodes with his friends. “I have to shut them up!” he moans, demonstrating, “I don’t want to pause this now… okay go to the bathroom, I’ll pause it for Cristssake!

“Yeah my friends are awful, they are really awful people,” he says, leaning into the recorder to re-iterate, “my friends are AWFUL!”

“It’s funny,” he laughs, “I shut them up for other people’s parts. Not just ‘hey, check out what Bender does’…the professor has a moment – ‘hey you missed the line…you missed the bit’…’you missed the Morbo bit, how could you miss the Morbo bit?!’”

While John is clearly happy keeping Futurama going, it’s not yet safe to declare the show back for good. There are three more DVD films to come out and if they do well, hopefully more will follow. “With these straight-to-DVD movies it could go on until… it’s got an infinite life span as long as everyone is still alive and stories are still being written, it’s totally cool! As long as we can do stuff like this, I’m game!”       Louise Steggals

Read our review of Bender’s Big Score here, and buy a copy for yourself by clicking here.