Hank Azaria, the Simpsons voice who learned which voices weren’t his

Hank Azaria

Photo: Neal Brennan / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 25, 1964 Queens, New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Actor and voice actor
Known for	Heat, Pretty Woman, Anastasia
Awards	3 Emmy · Annie

Somewhere in a Los Angeles recording booth, a bartender with a face like a dropped pie and a police chief who keeps losing his own gun share a single throat. It belongs to Hank Azaria, and for most of his working life that throat has been more famous than his face. He built a career on vanishing into sounds that were not his own. The late chapter of that career has been about something harder: working out which of those voices he ever had a right to, and finding one he could stand behind with the lights on him.

Henry Albert Azaria grew up in Queens, in a family whose story already ran through other languages. His paternal grandparents were Sephardic Jews, his grandfather from Salonika and his grandmother from Bergama, and the older generation spoke Ladino at home. His father ran dress-manufacturing businesses; his mother, Ruth, had worked as a publicist for Columbia Pictures. Azaria studied drama at Tufts University and then at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and he went west with the ordinary plan of becoming an actor people would recognise on camera.

The Simpsons got to him first, almost by accident. In 1989, with next to no voice experience, he was hired to take over Moe Szyslak, the bartender, after the character’s first recordings by another actor. Chief Wiggum followed, then Apu, the man behind the Kwik-E-Mart counter, and by the second season Azaria was a permanent member of the cast. The roster kept growing: Comic Book Guy, Professor Frink, Carl Carlson, Snake, Kirk Van Houten. The work brought him four Primetime Emmys for voice-over performance, in 1998, 2001, 2003 and 2015.

On camera the door opened through comedy, and through his feet. As Agador Spartacus, the Guatemalan houseman who keeps falling out of his shoes in Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage, he took scenes from Robin Williams and Nathan Lane and earned a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. The years around it were a character actor’s apprenticeship. He played a quiz-show producer in Robert Redford’s Quiz Show, a news cameraman chasing a monster through Manhattan in Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla and the Blue Raja, a superhero armed with cutlery, in Mystery Men. Television audiences knew him as David, the scientist who keeps leaving Phoebe and coming back, in Friends.

Then the parts got heavier. Playing the sportswriter Mitch Albom opposite Jack Lemmon in the television film Tuesdays with Morrie won him an Emmy. He carried Showtime’s Huff as a psychiatrist whose own life was coming apart, and on Broadway he played Sir Lancelot among several roles in Spamalot, which brought a Tony nomination. The family blockbusters paid for a lot of this. He was Kahmunrah, a lisping pharaoh, in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, and Gargamel, hunting small blue creatures across New York, in The Smurfs and its sequel. Later came an FBI chief in Ray Donovan, which earned him a guest-acting Emmy in 2016, his sixth, and four seasons as Jim Brockmire, a baseball announcer who melts down on air and drinks his way through minor-league towns, in IFC’s Brockmire.

The voice that complicated everything was Apu. For roughly three decades an actor from Queens with no South Asian heritage supplied the accent of Springfield’s Indian shopkeeper, and for many South Asian Americans who grew up with the show the character was the name bullies reached for. Hari Kondabolu’s 2017 documentary The Problem with Apu made that case on screen. In January 2020 Azaria stepped away from the role, and he later stopped voicing Carl as well. On Dax Shepard’s podcast Armchair Expert in April 2021 he went further than celebrity apologies usually go, describing the character as practically a slur and saying that part of him felt he needed to go to every single Indian person in the country and personally apologise.

The retreat was real, and it cost him a character he had played longer than most actors hold any job. It also let a larger question slide. Apu was written, drawn and kept on air by a whole writers’ room and a network for thirty years, yet the public reckoning landed almost entirely on the man reading the lines. Azaria accepted that weight without arguing; the show quietly moved on.

His other reckoning was private before it was public. Azaria has spoken openly about alcoholism, credits his friend Matthew Perry with pushing him towards Alcoholics Anonymous, and marked nineteen years without a drink in July 2025. Seen from there, Brockmire, a comedy about a broadcaster drinking himself to ruin, looks like an actor playing the version of himself he got away from. Azaria, born on 25 April 1964, was briefly married to Helen Hunt at the turn of the century and has been married to Katie Wright since 2007; they have a son, Hal.

Turning sixty produced the oddest pivot of all. Since August 2024 he has fronted Hank Azaria and the EZ Street Band, a tribute act that plays Bruce Springsteen’s songbook in theatres and at festivals, and he has said he never worked harder preparing for any role than on perfecting a singing impression of Bruce. This summer the band was on the bill at Summerfest in Milwaukee and Ottawa Bluesfest, and it returns to Asbury Park, the Jersey Shore town where Springsteen came up, on 14 October. It is impersonation again, but of a man he idolises, done in his own face and under his own name.

On screen he has kept the late roles grown-up. He played Thomas Edison in The Artist, a Gilded Age murder mystery that premiered in November 2025, and he is Peter Serian in Behemoth!, Tony Gilroy’s first feature since The Bourne Legacy, which had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on 2 October. Peter is the absent father of Pedro Pascal‘s touring cellist, a composer for cartoons and television who never found the work satisfying, with JoBeth Williams and Will Arnett completing the family.

Searchlight opens Behemoth! in US cinemas on 4 December, the same week the EZ Street Band plays Washington. The casting carries a joke Azaria is better placed than anyone to enjoy: after a lifetime as one of the most valuable voices in American animation, his most interesting new role is a man who wrote music for cartoons and wished he had done something else. At sixty-two, Azaria sounds like someone who has stopped wishing.

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Tags: actors, Pedro Pascal, Behemoth!, Hank Azaria, The Birdcage, Tony Gilroy

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