Nocturnal 
For 37 years he’s said absolutely nothing, letting a raised eyebrow do all the heavy lifting. Now Gromit has finally spoken – and he sounds exactly like Martin Freeman.
The claymation dog, best known for putting up with his hapless inventor owner Wallace across Aardman Animation’s Oscar-winning films, is getting his first autobiography this month. And because there’s an audiobook edition, somebody had to actually give him a voice.
That somebody is Freeman, the Sherlock and Hobbit actor, who recorded the narration earlier this month at Penguin Studios, as first reported by The Guardian and Variety.
“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?” said Nick Park, the Oscar-winning animator who created Wallace & Gromit, explaining the decision. “Who could possibly be the voice of a character everyone feels they know, but nobody’s actually heard? 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.”
Park was keen to stress, though, that Freeman isn’t exactly giving Gromit a cartoonish “voice” in the traditional sense. “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,” Park said.
Freeman is no stranger to playing the long-suffering sidekick, having spent years as Dr John Watson opposite Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes. He also voiced Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit trilogy and first made his name as Tim Canterbury in the original UK version of The Office.
Why it matters
Gromit has stayed completely mute across every one of his big-screen outings, including Oscar winners The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, relying purely on his expressions to react to Wallace’s disastrous inventions, a murderous penguin lodger and an army of hacked robot garden gnomes.
That silence has become part of the character’s appeal, so hearing him “speak” for the first time was always going to split opinion. According to LADbible, some fans reacted furiously online, branding the move a “criminal offence” and claiming it “broke a sacred code” of the franchise. Others were less fussed about which actor got the gig, simply unhappy that Gromit was speaking at all.
Not everyone was against it, though. Other fans said the voice “does feel like it matches him” and that they’d “always imagined it like this”, suggesting Freeman’s casting has at least some backing among the Wallace and Gromit faithful.
What happens next
Grand: The Autobiography of Gromit, as told to Nick Park, is released on 22 October, with the audiobook landing the same day and the hardback edition following on 24 November, according to The Express Tribune.
The book isn’t the only new addition to the Wallace & Gromit world this month. Larger Than Life, an immersive exhibition projected across four 11-metre walls, opens on 14 October at the Lightroom in King’s Cross, London, giving fans another way to revisit the franchise – this time without any dialogue required.
