Over the last week, we’ve seen several announcements regarding animation and the voicing of POC characters by white voice actors. Kristen Bell and Jenny Slate stepped down from roles on Central Park and Bigmouth. The Simpsons announced that they would no longer allow white people to voice POC characters, and Mike Henry has decided to give up the role of Cleveland Brown on Family Guy.
Today, Wendell Pierce (Suits, The Wire, Jack Ryan) put his hat in the ring to replace Henry as the voice of the long-time sidekick to Peter Griffin. If there’s one little catch in his pitch, its that he (probably due to a moment of over-exuberance at the idea of taking on such a classic character) said that he wants to voice him on the Cleveland Show. As you may recall, the Cleveland Show was cancelled in 2013. Thankfully, however, Brown was almost immediately brought back to Quahog where he could rejoin Peter, Quagmire, and Joe.
As big fans of Pierce, we are all for this, and we can only hope that he starts releasing dubs of classic Cleveland Brown scenes on social media in coming days.