New and familiar voices will help bring the robots in Transformers: Age of Extinction to life with today’s announcement that Ken Watanabe, John Goodman, John DiMaggio, Mark Ryan, Robert Foxworth and Reno Wilson will join veteran Transformers voice actors Peter Cullen and Frank Welker in the Michael Bay sequel.
Watanabe will voice new Autobot Drift while Goodman will voice Hound. Lockdown and Crosshairs will be voiced by Ryan and DiMaggio, respectively, while Foxworth returns as Ratchet and Wilson as Brains.
Welker, who voiced Megatron in the original Transformers animated series among countless other characters, was rumored to have lost the job for the live-action Megatron due to his voice not being what Bay was looking for. He joined the franchise in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen lending a voice to Soundwave and Ravage, and again as Soundwave plus Shockwave in Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Now Welker will get to voice Galvatron, who in the 1986 animated film Transformers: The Movie was born out of the dying body of Megatron.
Welker will get to re-team with his old partner Cullen who is reprising his role as the voice of Optimus Prime.
Paramount has yet to identify any voice actors for the Dinobots so it’s unclear at this time whether the monstrous robots will have a voice or merely synthesized roars. Also unclear is who the “ancient, powerful new menace” that comes to stalk Earth in the film is. The popular theory is that this menace is Unicron, the planet-munching Transformer and antagonist in Transformers: The Movie.
Transformers: Age of Extinction arrives in theaters everywhere on June 27.
