The team behind X-Men '97 has been open about how important it was for them to recapture the spirit of the original '90s cartoon, going so far as to put "false parameters" on themselves to imitate the decades-old animation. That effort to capture the nostalgia extends to the voice acting too, with several actors from the original returning to reprise their roles.
That doesn't, however, mean they got to skip the step of auditioning.
X-Men '97 voice actors Cal Dodd (Wolverine), Lenore Zann (Rogue), A. J. LoCascio (Gambit), Holly Chou (Jubilee), and Ray Chase (Cyclops) got together for an exclusive roundtable with IGN, where newcomers like LoCascio, Chou, and Chase shared their audition stories. That's when Dodd and Zann, who made the voices of Wolverine and Rogue iconic in the original cartoon, hopped in to point out that they had to go through the audition motions too.
"The scene that they picked [for the audition] was so obscure," Dodd explained. "...'What do you mean? He doesn't yell at anyone here, or scream or be ignorant or be funny, underhanded funny?' "
The scene, as Dodd explained, found Wolverine up North, after he's left the X-Men, "and the people are all celebrating because Wolverine fishes better than everyone."
"The Chief turns to him and says, 'the people are very happy, and it's all because of you,' " Dodd remembered. "[Wolverine] said, 'So do I. I feel happy too. I feel, I don't know, at peace.' But that's a scene that they picked me to do, and so unlike Wolverine, the voice that he ends up doing all the time. I found that interesting."
Zann, meanwhile, got a mysterious email that said something along the lines of, "Disney's gunna be doing some new show. They're not really saying what it is, but they're trying to find you. And I know how to get you, so can I give your number to them?"
Zann said yes, and eventually heard from casting director Meredith Layne, who still didn't tell her exactly what the show was, but sent her lines to read.
"They were the lines from the original show," Zann said. "And I was like, 'oh! It's Rogue! I'll just do Rogue.' And so I did it, and sent it off. And about a month later, three weeks later, I got a call saying, 'yeah, the producers want to meet with you on Zoom.' So then we went on Zoom, and they got me to read with Meredith on Zoom, and then at the end of it they were like, 'oh my god, Lenore, we just love you. Would you please be in the show? Because we really want you in the show.' I was like, 'absolutely! You got me.' "
Trying to Voice Match
The newcomers in the voice cast, however, had a different challenge - trying to match the voices of the cast members who came before them while also having the room to, you know, act. Chou joked that she had been training her whole life for the role, having specifically imitated X-Men voices with her friends as a child, but even she ran into that struggle.
"The trap is to lean too heavily into voice match and then you forget about actually acting, right?" she said. "And so I didn't want to just repeat Alyson (Court, who voiced Jubilee in the original show)'s voices, even though it was an audition where you're trying to sound like her. I just went and re-recorded and made sure it sounded like the thing, but it also sounded like I meant the things that I was saying."
Chou said the producers even said at one point, "we realize that we went for the voice match, but we hired really good actors for this, so why don't we sort of free them of that obligation to try to evoke the previous voices?"
"I think we do [evoke the previous voices] anyway because how could we not be influenced by that?" she pointed out. "That's gunna come through anyway."
There's little doubt that Chou and LoCascio were heavily influenced by X-Men: The Animated Series, having imitated the characters as kids and teenagers, but Chase admitted that he didn't grow up with the original series. So where did he find his specific inspiration for imitating Norm Spencer's Cyclops voice?
"There is a magical YouTube video called 'Cyclops Says Jean a Lot,' " Chase explained. "It's just nothing but him going, 'Jean! Jean! Jean! JEAN! JEEEEAN!' I met Ross Marquand last week at a convention and he said it's his also go-to for getting into the Professor X voice. Just saying 'Jean.' There's something about that name that just gets you into the X-Men-verse."
He went on to say that they struggled with figuring out what Cyclops' "level of dorkiness" would be in Chase's iteration.
"I said the line about Gambit - 'all he cares about are his stupid beignets' - like 100 times in varying degrees of whininess," Chase went on. "And over the course of like, months of recording, we settled into a voice where he's really getting into his role as a leader and he's calming down a bit, especially with the story of him and Jean and sort of being less of a boy scout. He still has that mentality, but not so much."
For more on X-Men '97, which premiered on March 20 and is now airing weekly, check out our review of the first two episodes, as well as more from our interview with executive producer Brad Winderbaum.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
