Veteran character actor and voice actor Patrick Warburton returns to the Disney stable for his new role in the studio’s animated feature Zootopia 2. He voices Mayor Winddancer, the latest civil servant to hold the top office in the land where wildly divergent animals live in harmony (or are supposed to, anyway).
He’s also a horse—and perhaps a horse’s ass if he’s as corrupt as Zootopia’s former mayor, a question that hovers over a movie in which Ginnifer Goodwin’s bunny cop and her partner, Jason Batemen’s fox, stumble on a major conspiracy that threatens the peace and harmony of the fauna-packed metropolis. Winndancer is a handsome stud, a former movie star with a gorgeous blond mane that marks him as the equine answer to Fabio—the opposite of Warburton’s close-cropped ‘do.
“These days, half of the hair on my head isn’t even real,” Warburton jokes during a visit to San Francisco. “Most of it’s powder.”
Kidding aside, the 61-year-old actor has built a singular career for himself over the last four decades. After dropping out of college to pursue modeling, he turned to acting, making his debut in a 1986 episode of The Paper Chase. More parts following, including a recurring role on the mid-‘90s Harry Anderson series Dave’s World. Then in 1995, he made the first of 10 scene-stealing appearances on Seinfeld as Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ mechanic boyfriend Puddy, followed by a recurring role in the fifth and final season of NewsRadio, playing a rival to Stephen Root’s station owner.
The photo that decorates Warburton’s International Movie Database (IMDB) page is the actor in costume as the titular character in The Tick. The 2001-2002 series based on Ben Edlund’s comic book poking fun at superheroes has gained cult status over the years but only ran for nine episodes on Fox, an outrage Warburton still feels 25 years later.
“Nobody was doing single camera, half-hour comedies at the time,” he says. “It was also expensive, you know, and some of the higher-ups at Fox were moronic at the time. They literally asked us if we needed to be in costume. We’re superheroes. They were confused, and they just fed us to the dogs.”
There have been live-action movies, including The Dish, Men in Black II, Get Smart, and most recently, Unfrosted. One that has had ramifications that have echoed throughout the years is Robinson Devor’s 1999 The Woman Chaser, based on Charles Willeford’s hardboiled novel, in which Warburton plays a used-car salesman turned obsessive auteur filmmaker. When Devor and Warburton brought the film’s director’s cut to San Francisco’s Roxie Theater in 2011, author Daniel Handler was in the audience.
When it came time to cast the Netflix adaptation of Handler’s children’s books A Series of Unfortunate Events, the writer suggested Warburton play novelist Lemony Snicket. More recently, Warburton has partnered with Devor for the first time in a quarter century, coming on board as an executive producer on Suburban Fury, Devor’s documentary in which would-be Gerald Ford assassin Sarah Jane Moore tells her own story. (The film opens at the Roxie on Friday, December 19.)
“Rob does interesting stuff. His documentaries are like meditations on the subject,” Warburton says. “I thought it was really fascinating that Sarah Jane Moore decided to do this. And it’s interesting because I tried to get a producer friend of mine involved, and she was upset that it was a man making the documentary. But Sarah Jane Moore trusted Rob. She’s the one who asked Rob.”
The road that led to Zootopia 2 began years ago when Warburton and his family were living in Woodland Hills. It was his wife, Cathy, who suggested he explore opportunities lending his voice to cartoons and animated features. The couple’s next-door neighbors were a voiceover artist and his partner, a voiceover agent. He signed with the agency and before long he’d booked his first Disney film, The Emperor’s New Groove, in which he played Kronk’s the villain’s cooking-obsessed sidekick, and inherited Tim Allen’s eponymous role in the animated series Buzz Lightyear of Star Command.
Many more animated projects would follow, among them 71 episodes of The Venture Brothers and over 300 episodes to date of Family Guy, and he is Grandpa Shark in Baby Shark movies and shows.
“There’s enough that you can glean from what you get,” Warburton says of animated works, where he is used to only seeing parts of a script. “I remember when I came into audition for The Emperor’s New Groove years ago. I only got four pages of Kronk. So being that it’s animated, you’re not really clear what these characters even are. I mean, a Kronk, you know? I remember thinking to myself, ‘Well, hmm, is he a robot, an ogre? A monster?’ But what I could discern was that he was a reticent henchman. He liked to cook, and he seemed to be a bit sweet. So, instead of making him sound dark, [I went in a different direction].
”I’ve loved my relationship with Disney throughout the years because it’s been a part of my life ever since I could remember as a little child,” he adds. “It’s a special thing to be able to be a part of, you know, Disney animated films that seem to last forever. I remember the ones like The Sword and the Stone; I remember that Sebastian Cabot was the one who narrated that. And that all has an impact on your life, and you always remember, so it’s wonderful to be able to be a little part of the Disney legacy.”
ZOOTOPIA 2 OPENS at Bay Area theaters on Wednesday, Nov. 26.
