‘Rick and Morty’ Voice Actor Ian Cardoni Says It’s A ‘Job Well Done’ When Nobody Knows Who He Is
Rick and Morty star Ian Cardoni hopes that the average fan hasn’t even noticed that he’s not Justin Roiland, but it’s hard to imagine that nobody clocked the change when Rick suddenly stopped DM’ing 16-year-olds to call them “jailbait.”
By now, the dust has settled on the biggest controversy in the history of Rick and Morty (beating out the whole Szechuan sauce debacle by a light-year), and the alleged misdeeds of a certain former series star and co-creator are now an ugly footnote in the history of the flagship Adult Swim series rather than an existential threat to it on par with Rick Prime. After Adult Swim fired Roiland following his arrest on domestic violence charges in early 2023, Roiland’s many rabid defenders (including Elon Musk) predicted/hoped that the ousting would spell the doom of Rick and Morty, but the show’s producers launched an exhaustive search for replacement voices that concluded with Cardoni and Harry Belden taking over the roles of Rick and Morty respectively.
As Rick and Morty Season Seven clearly demonstrated, Roiland wasn’t quite the series linchpin that he thought himself to be, and the show had arguably its strongest year since Season Four as Cardoni and Belden masterfully handled the emotionally charged conclusion to a certain series-long arc. While many Rick and Morty fans believe that Cardoni and Belden’s comparatively greater emotional range makes them an improvement over Roiland’s past performance in the title roles, Cardoni just wants everyone to forget that the character of Rick Sanchez even had a changing of the guard.
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During a recent interview with the radio station WBUR in his near-hometown of Boston, Cardoni explained that he knows he nailed the role when the lucky fans who missed Roiland’s scandal don’t realize that Rick started sounding a lot less predatory in Season Seven.
“I was very happy and am grateful to take on the role, a role that I loved in the first six seasons just as a fan, for Season Seven and beyond,” Cardoni said of his relationship to Rick Sanchez going into the arduous six-month audition process that saw him pitted against thousands of other soundalikes. “I’d watched (Rick and Morty) since about day one,” Cardoni said of his fandom, adding that his Rick voice was “always kind of a party trick. It was something I would do to make people laugh, or make myself laugh.”
“The opportunity to step into the role came up, and I decided to work on it a little harder, make it more than an impression, see what it really took to do the voice,” Cardoni said of the sought-after casting call. “Because I’m an actor by trade, I had that approach that I wanted to see if I could sustain it, see if I could take the character into new directions, and I’m very grateful to step into the role.”
Rick and Morty fans noticed Cardoni's more dramatic and more professional approach to the performance compared to his predecessor during pivotal Season Seven episodes, such as the critically acclaimed “Unmortricken,” and Cardoni’s trained acting chops opened up Rick to more emotional experiences than just flashes of anger and the occasional suicidal depression. But as a fan himself, Cardoni is just glad that Rick and Morty can continue unimpeded by personal monstrosity.
“The goal was to be seamless. The goal was to not be noticed,” Cardoni said of his primary objective after booking the part. “If a lot of fans didn’t know anything about the recasting situation, I think they’re just watching the show and enjoying it, and they might not know who I am. And that means it’s a job well done.”
As long as the Orange County District Attorney also doesn’t know who Cardoni is, we hope he keeps that job for a hundred years.
