Posted in: Adult Swim, Preview, Rick and Morty, TV | Tagged: Adult Swim, dan harmon, Justin Roiland, rick and morty, season 7

Rick and Morty Showrunner, Harmon Offer Details on Casting New Voices

Rick and Morty showrunner Scott Marder & Dan Harmon offer some insights into the casting process the led to Ian Cardoni and Harry Belden.

With the first Season 7 episode having officially premiered, we learned who had been cast to replace Justin Roiland as the voice of our dimension-hopping duo – Ian Cardoni (WWE WrestleMania narrator) as Rick Sanchez and Harry Belden (Joe Pera Talks With You) as Morty Smith (with their IMDB profiles hyperlinked). Now, Adult Swim's Rick and Morty Showrunner Scott Marder and series co-creator Dan Harmon are opening up about the casting process, why Cardoni & Belden made the cut (and what they had to go through), Harmon's limited role, who voiced Mr. Poopybutthole in the season opener (it wasn't Cardoni or Belden), and if Roiland's departure impacting the show creatively.

Over the course of the interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Marder & Harmon offer some interesting details on how the seventh season opener came together. With Roiland having previously voiced Mr. Poopybutthole and the character playing a prominent role in the season's first episode, Marder confirmed that John Allen was brought in to supply Poopy's voice. "He [John Allen] took pressure off of Ian and Harry, who were both working on Poopy, but it felt like too much for either of them to be doing him in an episode of the show that they had to completely redo," Marder explained. As for whether Roiland's departure and the recent cast additions had a creative impact on the animated series, the showrunner also clarified that Rick and Morty was "already seasons ahead" because of the team working together – so much so that Marder adds that when Roiland left, "he only really left by name."

Marder on "Pretty Rigorous Process" That Cardoni & Belden Went Through: "Ian was one of the first people I heard when the search began; he was in [the] first wave: 'Mark that guy, he's got major flashes of Rick,' which was awesome. We found Harry a lot later. They just stood out. At a certain point, we couldn't expect the first wave to just nail it from start to finish. Anyone that we felt had pure moments of either character, we had to bring back and see what they could do on their feet. We brought those guys back in with a wave of people a ton of times and made them go through a bunch of sides and do all scenes in a way we wouldn't even do normally just to see what their stamina was and if they could stay in voice. We put them through a pretty rigorous process."

Harmon on Getting Involved Late in the Casting Process: "I didn't want to even know their names. These guys would keep me blind in strategic ways. They were using me as a contestant on 'Is It Cake?' to test the foolproofness of this. There was a blind process where for all I knew, I was saying my favorite Rick is a different person than my favorite Morty. It was a very mindful process. I can't answer the question about what I liked about their reads other than that they sounded the most like the characters moving on and staying alive to me. I did meet both of these kids at a Dodgers game when we were celebrating wrapping the season, and I couldn't believe how young they were. I can't imagine what it's like for them to be wandering into this gig."

Harmon Likes What He Sees of Cardoni & Belden So Far: "Now that they've got the job, I can say that I like that they're already willing to work very hard because that's always going to be a requirement in recording these voices because we tend to develop these stories on the fly, and dialogue get rewritten and needs to be rerecorded as we're audio mixing and stuff like that."

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