Gromit is to break 37 years of on-screen silence, with Martin Freeman lending his voice to the audiobook edition of the claymation dog’s autobiography, Guardian Media reports.
The character has never uttered a word while appearing alongside his owner, the eccentric inventor Wallace, in a string of Oscar-winning films that include The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
His autobiography is being released this month, with an audiobook version also planned, according to Guardian Media.
Nick Park, the animator and film-maker who created the series, said the audiobook raised an unusual problem. “When you create a character who has no voice and whose facial expressions are everything, what do you do when your publisher reminds you there’ll be an audiobook?” he said. “Who could possibly be the voice of a character everyone feels they know, but nobody’s actually heard?”
Park said Freeman quickly emerged as the right person for the job. “The more I thought about it, the more I realised Martin Freeman was the obvious choice, really. I was genuinely thrilled and honoured when he said yes.”
Freeman has form as a long-suffering sidekick, having won Bafta and Emmy awards for his portrayal of Dr John Watson opposite Benedict Cumberbatch’s unpredictable detective in Sherlock. Guardian Media noted that the role should stand him in good stead for Gromit, who has tolerated Wallace falling in love with a serial killer, taking in a hardened criminal penguin as a lodger, and building a hackable robot gnome that produced an army of evil garden decorations.
Park said the actor would not be adopting an invented voice for the dog. “Martin is not doing a Gromit ‘voice’ as such,” he said. “He’s reading Gromit’s story as Gromit put it: his inner thoughts, his candid insights and endless witticisms, bringing to them his usual colour, thoughtfulness and wry humour.”
The book is not the only spin-off in development. Larger Than Life, an immersive behind-the-scenes experience projected across four 11-metre walls, opens on 14 October at the Lightroom in King’s Cross, London.
Grand: The Autobiography of Gromit, as told to Nick Park, is published on 22 October.
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