John DiMaggio, the voice Hulu almost recast, is Marcus Fenix again

John DiMaggio

Photo: Super Festivals / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 4, 1968 North Plainfield, New Jersey, United States
Occupation	Voice actor and actor
Known for	Zootopia, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Wreck-It Ralph
Awards	Annie · D.I.C.E.

Millions of people have quoted John DiMaggio’s lines back at each other, and very few of them could pick his face out of a crowd. The voice is gravel with a Jersey vowel lodged in it. It has sold a drunk, larcenous robot to audiences for a quarter of a century and, in a register lower still, a soldier who spends most of his life behind cover. That gap between the sound and the man is the whole story of his career. It is also the gap a studio once tried to exploit.

The newest test of it is Gears of War: E-Day, the prequel from The Coalition and People Can Fly that rewinds Marcus Fenix fourteen years, to the day the Locust Horde broke through the ground of Sera. The studio rebuilt everything for it from an empty hard drive, as its technical director put it, down to the hundreds of facial shapes built for each character. It did not rebuild the voice. The younger, more vulnerable Marcus is played by the same actor who growled through the original trilogy.

DiMaggio was born on September 4, 1968, and grew up in North Plainfield, New Jersey, where he did theatre at the local high school before studying it at Rutgers University. He left in his junior year. Stand-up came next, built on impressions, including a stint in a comic duo called Red Johnny and the Round Guy, and a friendship with the actor Zak Orth pushed him toward the booth. His first screen jobs were in front of the camera: a recurring doctor on Chicago Hope and, in the TNT film Pirates of Silicon Valley, a young Steve Ballmer.

Then came Bender. Matt Groening’s Futurama arrived on Fox in 1999, and the robot DiMaggio voiced, a bending unit with a cigar habit and no conscience, became the show’s engine. He won an Annie Award for the role in 2001. The series has since been cancelled and revived more times than most sitcoms get renewed, moving from Fox to Comedy Central to Hulu, and Bender has survived every move.

The rest of the 2000s turned him into the busiest heavy in the business. He was Wakka and Kimahri in Final Fantasy X, the blue-skinned mad scientist Dr. Drakken in Kim Possible, and Rico, the penguin who communicates mostly in grunts, in The Penguins of Madagascar. In 2006 he became Marcus Fenix in the first Gears of War, a performance the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences rewarded with its prize for outstanding character performance.

The warmest of his roles came in 2010. As Jake the Dog in Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time, he played a shape-shifting older brother who could stretch into a boat and still sound like the most relaxed man in the room, across 279 episodes that ran until 2018. Groening called on him again for Disenchantment on Netflix, as the hot-tempered King Zøg, and Bruce Timm’s Batman: Caped Crusader cast him as a grizzled Harvey Bullock.

He had been making the case for his trade long before it became a headline. In 2013 he narrated and executive-produced I Know That Voice, a documentary about the people whose work everyone hears and almost nobody credits.

The headline arrived in 2022. When Hulu announced a new Futurama that February, DiMaggio was missing from the cast list, and trade reports said Bender would be recast over a pay dispute he later called BenderGate. The comedian James Adomian pointed out that a casting call for a DiMaggio sound-alike had gone out; Mark Hamill, Tara Strong and Kari Wahlgren spoke up; fans threatened a boycott. The tidy version is that the fans won. They did not, quite. Hulu was days from its first table read, with a plan to hand Bender to a different guest voice every episode, and DiMaggio returned that March without the raise he had asked for. “What I did get was a lot of respect,” he said afterwards. The episode proved that a studio could imagine Bender without him. It also showed that nobody wanted to watch the experiment.

Lately the face has been getting more work. He played Alderman Fenwick in Interview with the Vampire and Frank Finnerty in Perry Mason, and this year he turned up in Fox’s Best Medicine, the American remake of Doc Martin, as Bert Large, the town contractor, opposite Josh Charles.

The voice work has not slowed to make room. Futurama season 14 began streaming on Hulu on August 3, 2026, and at San Diego Comic-Con in July Hulu ordered three extended specials, the first of them a Christmas episode due in 2027. Adventure Time: Side Quests, a return to the early days of Finn and Jake, premiered on June 29 on Disney+ and Hulu, with Cartoon Network rolling it out internationally from October 5. Gears of War: E-Day opened to early access on October 1 and launches on October 6 for Xbox Series X/S and Windows, day one on Game Pass.

Off the clock, DiMaggio splits his time between Los Angeles and New York and has been married to the actress Kate Miller since 2014.

At 58 he is voicing a younger Marcus Fenix than the one he played at 38, and a robot who will be back for Christmas next year. The industry spent 2022 asking whether that voice could be swapped out. The answer, for now, is on every screen it ships to.