I hear God calling… oh wait, that’s Optimus Prime.
There are a couple of voices permanently stuck in the collective consciousness when it comes to guidance. Well, at least in mine anyway. Galadriel from The Lord of the Rings is one. Optimus Prime is the other.
Commanding, godlike, authoritative and firm, but still somehow loving, Peter Cullen gave Optimus enough soul to make generations of kids believe every word he said.
The legendary voice actor, whose deep baritone became inseparable from Optimus Prime, has died aged 85. Cullen passed away peacefully at his Los Angeles home on August 26, surrounded by family.
For more than 40 years, that voice meant something.
Cullen first played the Autobots’ leader in the original Transformers animated series in 1984, taking what could have been a fairly straightforward cartoon hero and giving him patience, warmth and an almost ridiculous amount of emotional weight.
Optimus sounded powerful, obviously. But Cullen never played him like the loudest guy in the room.
That came from his older brother Larry, a US Marine veteran, who gave Cullen a piece of advice before the audition: don’t play the Hollywood version of a hero. Real strength, he told him, could be gentle.
It became the foundation of Cullen’s performance, and eventually something close to a philosophy for the character himself.
Peter Cullen made a robot feel human.
Cullen would return to Optimus again and again, from The Transformers: The Movie through Michael Bay’s blockbuster live-action films, video games and 2023’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.
But his career was much stranger and broader than one heroic robot.
He was also Eeyore across decades of Winnie the Pooh, voiced K.A.R.R. in Knight Rider, played Monterey Jack in Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers, roared as King Kong and even created the clicking, guttural sounds of the creature in Predator.
It’s an absurdly good body of work, covering everything from gloomy donkeys to intergalactic hunters.
Still, Optimus was the role that followed him.
Maybe because Cullen understood that the character wasn’t really about robots, battles or saving the universe. Underneath all of that, Optimus was about trying to do the decent thing when doing the decent thing was difficult.
In a statement confirming his death, Cullen’s family asked fans to honour his legacy by serving their communities and leading others with “compassion, integrity and loyalty.”
They closed with the words Cullen carried from his brother into an audition room more than four decades ago, before passing them on to millions of people through a cartoon robot:
“Be strong enough to be gentle.”
There are voices from films and stories that somehow hang around long after you first hear them, becoming part of the way you think about courage, kindness or what to do when things get hard.
For me, Peter Cullen’s Optimus Prime voice is the ultimate voice of guidance, always pointing you towards the decent thing.
And I can’t imagine that voice going anywhere.
