This Voice Actor From ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ Still Makes Tom Kenny Do the ‘They’re Selling Chocolate’ Voice
When Wendy’s dropped its viral Krabby Patty Kollab Burger this week, it missed a golden opportunity to throw in a chocolate frosty and make all the SpongeBob SquarePants fans scream, “What are they selling???”
Right now, the fast-food-eating contingency of the classic cartoon community are all chowing down on the newest reminder that SpongeBob SquarePants is still a cultural force that cannot be denied. While SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg certainly didn’t approve of corporations using his comedic masterpiece to sell junk food to kids, the Wendy’s tie-in has sparked an outpouring of SpongeBob nostalgia this week as older fans of the flagship Nickelodeon comedy reminisce about their earliest memories of salivating at the detailed drawings of the mythical Krabby Patty.
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In terms of food-related nostalgia sparked by SpongeBob SquarePants, there is, perhaps, no single junk-food-focused scene in the show’s history that’s more quoted than the sales pitch in the classic episode “Chocolate with Nuts” where SpongeBob and Patrick attempt to schmooze an elderly woman and her even-more-decrepit mother into buying their “magical” chocolate bars. Even the actress who played “Lazy” Mary in the scene can’t stop quoting it. And in a conversation with BuzzFeed, Sirena Irwin admitted that she still makes Tom Kenny do the mom’s voice, even if he always hated it!
Irwin, who has voiced dozens of different side characters throughout her decades working on SpongeBob, recalled how she first got the job as a voice actress on the series back at the turn of the Millennium by mailing a physical copy of her sizzle reel to Hillenburg using USPS, a practice that’s almost as archaic as her shriveled, chocolate-hating mother.
“I was called in to read for Sandy, Pearl and Mrs. Puff,” Irwin told BuzzFeed. “I heard back that they were not casting me as any of those characters, but they liked that I had range and wanted to include me as a utility player.” Besides her brief performance as Mary, Irwin has played a wide range of supporting-but-memorable characters including SpongeBob’s mother, Mr. Krabs’ mother and the Magic Conch Shell, which was basically the matriarch of SpongeBob’s secret club.
As for her big scene in “Chocolate with Nuts,” Irwin recalled how, in a pre-pandemic, nearly pre-historic era of TV production, scenes such as this classic were often recorded with both actors in the studio at the same time, as opposed to the performers sending in their voiceovers separately. “It was just a playful experience,” Irwin said of the opportunity to work directly with her scene partner Kenny as he played both SpongeBob and the Mary’s ancient mother. “We got to find those characters together, the mother and the daughter, and the sort of ‘put upon feeling of having to care for your mother.’”
“I love Tom’’s voice so much for Mary’s mom,” Irwin gushed. “Recently I saw him and said, ‘Wait, let me hear that voice again!’ It’s so good! The writers created this great relationship between these two. I wish they were in more episodes!”
Considering how “Chocolate with Nuts” came out in 2002, that chocolate would have actually had to make Mary and her mother immortal for those characters to make a return.
