Movies Features

It’s a tossup whether the best Eugene Levy characters are the nitwits or the nut jobs. On SCTV, the Canadian actor with the Groucho Marx eyebrows played numskull anchorman Earl Camembert. As a noggin-damaged folksinger in the film A Mighty Wind, he managed to be both tragic and hilarious. And sometimes, as with the robot he gives voice to in the animated adventure Astro Boy (opening on Friday [October 23]), Levy pulls off the trick of being both basket case and dim bulb simultaneously.

“I tend to gravitate to characters that are not the sharpest pencils in the drawer,” says the actor, speaking on the phone from Los Angeles. “It’s always more fun to play someone that’s a little dumber than the dumbest person that’s watching.”

But when it comes to Orrin, the robot servant of a scientist and his son in a futuristic space city, Levy prefers gentle psychoanalysis. “Orrin is not a dumb character. He’s a guy whose nerves have been shot by the abuse that he’s taken by this kid, Toby, and the tone that Dr. Tenma has with him. He’s a live nerve end.”

Once, Levy didn’t have the slightest idea who Toby and Dr. Tenma were. “I’m 60-something, and I’d never heard of it,” he says of the 57-year-old manga series by Osamu Tezuka upon which the film is based. After voicing the character Clovis in 2006’s Curious George, Levy at least knew that monkey business. In fact, Levy didn’t mind being new to the cartoon saga of the boy who, after a fatal accident, is rebuilt by his father into a flying robot child who battles evil as Astro Boy.

“You go in; you talk to the director; you meet the characters, in the storyboard sense; you find out what it’s about; and then you go about doing your job,” he says. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help championing the underdog loose-screwed Orrin. “He’s a relic who’s about to be discarded, and he knows that. So there’s a lot of heartfelt qualities there that I loved.”

Levy both worked and didn’t work with Nicolas Cage, Donald Sutherland, and Freddie Highmore—who voice Dr. Tenma, baddie General Stone, and Toby/Astro, respectively. Although Levy’s Orrin shares scenes with those characters, the actors themselves didn’t so much as brush shoulders. “The odd thing about these animated projects is you really don’t get to work with the other cast members,” he says. “You’re in a sound booth by yourself.”

Similarly, in Toronto long ago, Levy did voice work for radio and commercials. “You don’t have to show up hours early for makeup,” he says, “and you’ve got the script in front of you.” At Astro Boy’s microphone, he put himself in his director’s hands. “These guys—in this case, David Bowers—are really brilliant at what they do. Oddly enough, the best comedies today are animated movies.”

He even relished the loneliness of the sound-booth actor. “The process is ultimately very rewarding,” he says. “It’s a really interesting acting exercise having someone take you through 15 variations on how to do a line.”