ComingSoon spoke to Farzar star Lance Reddick about his role in the new Netflix adult animated comedy series, seeing it release so close to Resident Evil, and what he enjoys about voice acting.
“Egotistical human warrior Renzo liberated the planet Farzar from the evil alien Bazarack, and then established a human settlement under a huge dome, becoming the Czar of Farzar,” explains the synopsis. “Years later, Farzar is under attack by the evil aliens once again and Renzo’s well-meaning and not-so-bright son Prince Fichael ventures out with his special crew ‘S.H.A.T.’ (Special Hostile Assault Team!), made up of a human-solider-turned-cyborg (Scootie), clashing conjoined twins (Val and Mal), an unhinged scientist (Barry Barris), a highly incapable mutant (Billy) and a mischievous little alien known as a chaos-celot. (Zobo). As they begin their journey to fight the aliens that want to kill/eat them, Fichael quickly discovers that all is not what it seems and he may be living a lie.”
Tyler Treese: Renzo is such a fun character. He’s this total subversion of the generic eighties cartoon hero. He’s very set on keeping the throne and very manipulative. What was the biggest thrill with just playing around with his character?
Lance Reddick: Being able to be absolutely crazy. I’m gonna be a little geeky now. The second pilot of Star Trek, the William Shatner pilot, I remember he has this line, cause this section of space they goes through turns people that have high ESP ratings into godlike beings. So he says to the doctor, “You know the ugly, savage things we all keep buried, that none of us dare expose, but he’ll dare. Who’s to stop him?” That’s how I feel about Renzo. He doesn’t need to care, who is going to stop him? Well, except for Queen Flammy.
July’s kind of your month. You also have resident evil coming out. How wild is it? You know, having these two great Netflix shows coming out around the same time
It’s surreal, it’s trippy, and the week has been so crazy because of publicity that it’s hard for me to… I haven’t slowed down enough to be scared about it. So that’s one good thing.
How would you compare your characters of Renzo and Wesker? They’re not the typical heroes.
I love how different they are and how the thing about Wesker, at least the Wesker of our show, is that you start thinking that he’s one thing and then you find out that he’s something else. It kind of happens a little bit with Renzo, only in that you find out he’s got some humanity. Cause you find out that he actually cares about his son.
You’ve done some really great voice work in the past, like Sylens in the Horizon games. So what, what do you find most satisfying about working in voiceover and having the freedom to do these different types of roles that maybe you wouldn’t do in live-action?
It’s interesting because Sylens, I think, is the kind of character that I might actually play in live-action.
The other thing is that it’s kind of a different animal talking about pure animation versus video games because even though, technically it’s similar in that usually you’re recording your lines by yourself and you’re just doing your lines, but doing a show like this, you get a chance to read the script before. So you actually have some context going in, whereas more often than not in video games, you rely on the director so much because you don’t have almost any context. Like that has to be given to you while you’re recording. So, those are the two differences for me.
But as far as kind of the differences between what I get to do live-action and what I get to do animation, I mean, I’ve been really fortunate, especially in the last 10 years, and that I’ve been able to do so many different kinds of things both voiceover and live-action. I’ve just been lucky.
Farzar is now streaming on Netflix.
