The release of a new Wallace and Gromit film has always been much anticipated in our house, and this year was no different. Like many others, we snuggled under the blankets after a full Christmas day (in every sense), ready for the release of Vengeance Most Fowl (2024). Four years in the making, it was produced by Aardman Animations and the BBC, in association with Netflix, and was Wallace and Gromit’s sixth film, and second feature-length film after The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).
We were halfway through this claymation, stop-motion spectacle before I remembered that Wallace’s voice was not being played by actor Peter Sallis, who sadly died in 2017, but instead had been seamlessly voiced by someone else. A quick Google search later to see if an AI voice had been used in the production (as is a developing trend), I was delighted to find that British actor, Ben Whitehead, had voiced the part.
Eager to know more about how he prepared, I discovered that as a fan of the first film, A Grand Day Out (1989), he grew up doing voices, accents and impressions as a boy. In 2003, a friend at Aardman hired him as a voice actor for Were-Rabbit. By 2005, he was Sallis’s understudy and by 2009, he was Wallace’s voice full-time, owing to Sallis’ failing health.
