‘The Simpsons’ Casts Kevin Michael Richardson To Take Over Voicing Dr. Julius Hibbert
For 31 years, actor Harry Shearer has provided the voice of Dr. Julius Hibbert onThe Simpsons. But that streak came to an end with this past Sunday’s episode, “DiaryQueen.” As promised last summer, the show’s producers have hired a Black actor to replace Shearer and voice the Black character.
Vulturereports that Harry Shearer’s tenure as Dr. Hibbert has come to an end. Starting with this coming weekend’s episode, “Wad Goals,” the character will now be voiced byKevin Michael Richardson, who voiced Goro in the 1995Mortal Kombatmovie and has since acted in hundreds of episodes of television in shows likePinky and the Brain,Static Shock,Teen Titans,Star Wars: The Clone Wars,The Boondocks, andF is for Family, just to name a few. He’s also a veteran ofThe Simpsons, having lent his voice to characters like Anger Watkins, Jimi Hendrix, Dave Chappelle, and many more since 2009, so this is familiar territory for him. (Shearer, of course, is still involved with the series – he voices characters like Mr. Burns, Waylon Smithers, Principal Skinner, Ned Flanders, Reverend Lovejoy, Kent Brockman, and more.)
After Hank Azariastepped awayfrom the role of convenience store owner Apu onThe Simpsonslast year, the producers decided to change their policy about voice actors playing certain roles. “Moving forward,The Simpsonswill no longer have white actors voice non-white characters,“they said. This casting switch-up is the latest example of the producers following through on that promise, however belatedly:The Hollywood Reporterpoints out that Richardson’s casting comes in the wake of Alex Désert being brought in to play Homer Simpson’s co-worker Carl Carlson, previously voiced by Azaria, and Jenny Yokobori taking over as Comic Book Guy’s wife, Kumiko Albertson, who was previously voiced by Tress MacNeille.
This is part of a larger, long-needed move toward accurate representation that is taking place in the world of animation. Within the past year, white actor Mike Henry walked away from the role of Black character Cleveland Brown onFamily Guy(Arif Zahirended up being castin that role), and both Netflix’sBig Mouthand AppleTV+‘sCentral Parkdecided toswitch up their castingto give people of color the opportunity to voice characters of color on those shows.
Richardson has won two Daytime Emmy nominations for his work as the Joker inThe Batman, an animated series which aired in the mid-2000s. If he can win an award for embodying a character as iconic as the Joker (and one which had such a defining performance by Mark Hamill years earlier inBatman: The Animated Series), he’ll be just fine playing Dr. Hibbert onThe Simpsons.
