Celebrity Impressions for NPCs

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

How often have you done an celebrity impression when performing you character or an NPC? It occurred to me Chris Walken would be a good Strahd of Ravenoft, so I wonder about other celebrities, such as Cruise, Nicholson, Julia Child, etc. Have you ever done anything like this?

 

[Dioltach]

Sean Bean would make a good Sturm Brightblade. Jeremy Irons could probably do a good job of a bitingly sarcastic elf.

 

[Slabtown Jake]

I find that my best celebrity impressions are those that I'm no good at. For example, I can't do a Val-Kilmer-as-Doc-Holliday impression to save my life, but that's a good thing!

Let's say I've got an NPC that's going to recur. I can just write down "Voice - Doc Holliday" in my notes. Whenever that NPC shows up, I do my best Doc Holliday impression. Since I do the same voice every time, it's consistent. And since I'm so bad at doing a recognizable Val Kilmer, the players don't think, "Oh, this guy sounds like Doc Holliday," they just think he sounds like that NPC.

It works like a charm.

 

[am181d]

I had a villain in a DC Heroes game years ago that I used my Sean Connery voice for.

Also, I feel obligated to reference THAT episode of Big Bang Theory.

 

[gamerprinter]

I tend to do a lot of weird voices as speaking NPC/villains, not necessarily celebrity impressions, though I have done Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Peter Lorre for mad doctor, vampires, and mad doctor sidekick, respectively. I've done a Nixon impression for one bureaucratic bad guy for one game, but as stated I generally do weird voices and accents, but not any particular real life person or celebrity.

 

[ExploderWizard]

For some NPCs, I will envision a particular actor playing them and then play them as such. Its a lot of fun. Part of the fun is choosing some less well known celebs and seeing if anyone recognizes the impressions. I once used Joaquim de Almeida as a swashbuckling enemy npc. Sometimes an npc will just have a minor role and a few descriptive adjectives and a voice will spring out of nowhere-or from one of the players! In campaign I ran a few years ago, the PCs were going to spy on a secret meeting between some npc they had been following and his contact, a bandit leader that was very tall and lanky. Since the players had never met any of the bandits and didn't know any names, he was described as " the tall guy". One joke from a player later and the npc suddenly had a voice- Jeff Goldblum.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I find that doing your own impression of a celebrity produces some good voices to use for NPCs... but unfortunately, most times when I've heard it done, the DM wasn't actually doing his OWN impression. He was recreating the voice of an impressionist doing that celebrity.

As a result... any "famous" impression immediately ruins the situation. Walken, Shatner, Bush, Nicholson. No one really ever does their own impressions... they do their own take on someone else's impression of these people. But when you do that... you end up focusing your voice on the "gimmick" of that comedian's impersonation, thereby making it blatantly obvious whose voice you are doing. As a result... you no longer are inhabiting an NPC (as far as the players are concerned). All they can do is say "Hey, your tavernkeeper is Bill Clinton!"

This is why every single Shatner impression that ever gets done has the same exact halting cadence and emphasis that Kevin Pollak originated as the "Shatner gimmick" 20+ years ago... despite the fact that Shatner himself doesn't talk that way much at all. But it's become so iconic that it's how we all now think a Shatner impersonation has to have. And if you were to use that voice for an NPC... with your impression focusing on the halting cadence gimmick rather than actually recreating the sound of his voice... everyone knows you're doing Shatner as opposed to voicing an NPC.

So my recommendation is that if you are going to do impressions of celebrities for some voices... don't use any celebrity for whom you are familiar with another more famous impression. Do James McAvoy... don't do Sean Connery. Cause once you try to... you're gonna end up with an entire table shouting "Shuck it, Trebek!" and thus ruining the entire point.

 

[gamerprinter]

I find that doing your own impression of a celebrity produces some good voices to use for NPCs... but unfortunately, most times when I've heard it done, the DM wasn't actually doing his OWN impression. He was recreating the voice of an impressionist doing that celebrity.

Unless you do both voice impressions, and have not watched television, nor comedy specials in the past 20 years (like myself) and have no idea what another impressionist might sound like. I watch movies, not television. Last time I noticed an impressionist was Rich Little, which was like the 1970's when I was a kid (the last time I consistently watched television). I've never even heard a William Shatner impression, by anyone - though I heard a Christopher Walken impression in a movie once.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Unless you do both voice impressions, and have not watched television, nor comedy specials in the past 20 years (like myself) and have no idea what another impressionist might sound like. I watch movies, not television. Last time I noticed an impressionist was Rich Little, which was like the 1970's when I was a kid (the last time I consistently watched television). I've never even heard a William Shatner impression, by anyone - though I heard a Christopher Walken impression in a movie once.

Okay. If you've never heard a Shatner impression done before but would also select him as someone whose voice you'd use for an NPC, more power to you.

But at no point in my times of hearing someone doing an impression of Shatner were they ever actually doing an impression of Shatner... they were doing an impression of Kevin Pollak doing an impression of William Shatner. Likewise, every George H. W. Bush impression I heard was actually a Dana Carvey impression of him doing Bush. Most Connery impressions are really Darrell Hammond impressions of Connery, Walken impressions are of Jay Mohr or Pollak doing Walken, etc. etc.

So my point is that those impressions have become so iconic that they aren't the kinds of celebrities you really would want to use, because the people who hear them immediately can recognize them as celebrities, rather than just an interesting voice and quirk.

 

[Morrus]

This gives me an idea for a thread. YouTubes of examples that folks can use/get inspiration from.