I hear Richard Kind before I see him, his voice slicing through the upper section of London’s Garrick Theatre like a sort of truculent, glottal air raid siren. He’s yelling the name of a publicist. If you don’t know Richard Kind by name, you might know the face – but you’ll definitely know the voice. It’s one of the most distinctive in Hollywood, heard stealing scenes in Curb Your Enthusiasm, as Larry David’s carping cousin; in the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, as the disturbed brother of Michael Stuhlbarg; or in Pixar’s Inside Out, where he voices the imaginary, elephantine Bing Bong. Truly, nobody else on Earth really sounds like Richard Kind.
“Personally, I hate my voice,” he tells me, once we’ve sat down in a small, cosy room adjoining the auditorium. “Whenever I hear it, I go, ‘Oh my God, how could you sound like that?’” The New York Times once described Kind’s voice as “aggressively nasal”; it’s true there’s a certain sinus-y quality to it, but the accent is just as much a distinguishing feature – a bespoke concoction forged during childhood, half-New York, half-Philly. “And my mouth happens to move like a muppet,” he adds, flopping open his jaw in demonstration. “It’s very malleable.”
