Elon Musk was a guest on The Simpsons?” Harry Shearer repeats back to me. He doesn’t seem to know what I’m talking about. Ordinarily, you might expect an actor to remember when the richest man on Earth appeared on the same TV show as them. And not just that – Musk had a whole Simpsons episode devoted to him, 2014’s “The Musk Who Fell to Earth”, in which the much-criticised tech magnate becomes embroiled in a feud with the nefarious Mr Burns, voiced by Shearer. But this is, of course, no ordinary TV show. Having played dozens upon dozens of characters across a staggering 757 episodes, Shearer can be forgiven for dropping one or two into his memory’s dustbin.
Now 79, Shearer speaks to me from his home in New Orleans. It is Thanksgiving, and his wife, the Welsh singer-songwriter Judith Owen, is in Paris performing. It’s immediately a surreal experience hearing his voice over the phone: every so often, you can hear his characters – cheery, churchgoing Ned Flanders and fusty school principal Seymour Skinner among them – as they creep into the sturdy nasal tenors of his natural speaking pattern. Shearer has a face, too, of course. It’s been curtained in long glam-rocker hair for Spinal Tap’s Derek Smalls, rushed through dozens of different get-ups for Saturday Night Live, and even caked in elaborate prosthetics to portray Richard Nixon in the Sky Arts series Nixon’s the One. But today, he’s purely a voice.
