Disney’s live-action Aladdin remake hits theaters in less than three months, so this casting news is cutting things a bit close: As per Variety, Alan Tudyk has signed on to voice Iago, the nefarious parrot to the even more nefarious villain Jafar. The announcement comes mere hours after the full-length trailer, featuring some blessedly non-blue Will Smith genie moments, dropped online.
Tudyk, of course, is beloved among the geeks. He’s a vet of the Joss Whedon-verse, having played beloved pilot Wash on Firefly and in its spin-off movie Serenity. At Disney, he’s a legend, having done voicework in every one of the studio’s big animated features since Wreck-It-Ralph, and voiced the reprogrammed droid K-S20 in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
In non-Disney news, he also does Joker in the Harley Quinn series. That said, to some of us he will always be the guy who thinks he’s a pirate in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.
As for Iago, he, of course, was voiced by Gilbert Gottfried in original animated Aladdin, yapping up a storm even as he plotted our heroes’ downfall. Tudyk will have a lot to live up to, and that’s on top of his vocal stylings being paired with a considerably hotter Jafar than Disney fans have been used to.
(Via Variety)
