Nintendo and Illumination are set to release Super Mario Bros. next year, and we are getting some more fun details about the animated film based on one of the biggest video game properties. Keegan-Michael Key told Variety that for the Mario movie, he “improvised a song” as his character, Toad, the goofy little man with a mushroom on his head who has been a staple character in the franchise.
“I got to improvise a song in Super Mario Bros., which was an absolute blast. That was just a stick of fun, that whole thing,” he said.
It is not as strange as it initially sounds that Keegan-Michael Key will have Toad sing in the Mario movie. At New York Comic Con, Jack Black said that Bowser has “a little bit of rocking” as he dug into his rock and metal inspirations from his music career in Tenacious D.
Expect to hear Keegan-Michael Key sings a song as Toad in the Mario movie
If you watched the trailer for the film, then you have heard a few of the key actors already. The trailer showed off Black doing a villainous voice for Bowser, Chris Pratt doing a slight New York Italian accent that sounds more like his normal voice, and Keegan-Michael Key showing off his high register in the Mario movie. To get to that, it took collaboration to get it to where he wanted as it kept pushing it “higher and higher.”
The process of getting the voice that audiences will hear sing took the actor some time. He worked with his significant other and the directors, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic. Over that process, he looked back on the voice they found, and he said he was “really happy with where we ended up.”
The film will also star Anya-Taylor Joy, Seth Rogan, Charlie Day, and Fred Armisen, although we have not heard how far they will go with their voices. What we heard in the trailer sets the bar for how high or low people reached when finding a voice for their character. We will find out when it hits theaters on April 7, 2023.