Rick And Morty's New Voice Actors Revealed In Season 7 Premiere

Finally. Finally finally finally the mystery is revealed.

Nine months after Adult Swim severed ties with Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland, and apparently six months after the casting search began, season seven premiered Sunday night. For the first time, viewers, readers, and fans learned who were his replacements as the lead characters, as well as one of his most prominent recurring characters.

After hearing them in the season trailer and the cold open for the episode, titled “How Poopy Got His Poop Back”, respectively, fans could finally put names to the faces. Scientist Rick Sanchez is now voiced by Ian Cardoni and his hapless grandson Morty, to put it simply, is now voiced by Harry Belden. Cardoni is a Boston-area native who graduated from Emerson College whose previous roles include Larry David’s Clear History and voiced promos for Syfy’s Resident Alien, WWE and Apple TV+. Belden was born and raised in Chicago and attended the Second City Training Center. He’s made appearances on the network’s Joe Pera Talks With You, Fox’s Proven Innocent and NBC’s Chicago Med. However with the SAG-AFTRA strike still ongoing they’re not in position to talk to the press about their new roles.

While Cardoni and Belden can’t talk, remaining co-creator Dan Harmon and showrunner Scott Marden can, and have detailed their process and goals with the recasting process. They wanted the recasting to be as seamless as possible so viewers, whether they knew what happened or not, couldn’t notice a difference. They also believe adding Cardoni and Belden extends the show’s lifespan, at minimum beyond the three seasons the show still has after the seventh with the 70 episodes ordered in 2018 after season three, but Marden is saying as much as thirty. Marden even calls Solar Opposites’s casting of Dan Stevens to replace Roiland (as 20th Century Animation also cut ties)…or attempting to bring in name actors for Rick and Morty something that would “minimize the chances of show’s survival”. It’s slightly unclear but what is clear is the latter was never in serious consideration. They cited the hypothetical absurdity of Homer Simpson not sounding like he does.

The reason Harmon and Marden split the roles of Rick and Morty between two actors was “quality of life” and the burden of work, as they even cited it wore down Roiland, who voiced many supporting and one-off characters. That included the star of Sunday’s season premiere, Mr. Poopy Butthole, who debuted in “Total Rickall” and whose spiral began due to events in the fourth season episode “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty”. Taking this role, let alone being distributed all of Roiland’s roles in some manner would still be a lot for these newcomers in all these rerecordings, and so it’s a third actor taking over Poopy: John Allen. He’s said to be a late addition because both Cardoni and Belden tried bringing their own take.

Roiland’s ties were severed following misconduct allegations in January that included allegedly sending abusive direct messages to a fan, problematic interview comments resurfacing and workplace behavior issues. Domestic violence charges that occurred at the time were dropped in March.

The exhaustive six month search was so wide that they heard thousands of candidates. They apparently pondered a global hotline but they knew it would backfire fast. Difficulty was vastly underestimated. For Rick in particular everyone sounded like Macho Man Randy Savage or a hypothetical similarly-sounding cousin. No one sounded exactly like Rick. It was tricky. They could invoke him well for bursts but not maintain him through full scenes.

With such few scenes for Morty after Rick went to help Poopy via a non-intervention-turned-bender, episode 2, “The Jerrick Trap”, certainly looks more Morty-involved. We’ll get to hear more of Cardoni and Belden when that episode and the at least 39 to come air on Adult Swim.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter