Voice Actor - Richard Horvitz

We are in a time when hollywood celebrity actors dominate the majority of the big budget voice-over roles in animated feature films - like Ben Stiller and Brad Pitt... Seriously? Did you hear their awful voice performances in Madagascar and Mega Mind?

Granted not all film actors do a bad job of doing cartoon voices for big budget animated films, people like Jack Black and Bill Hader did amazing jobs in my opinion. But when you have trained voice artists that have taken decades to perfect their craft, you have talents like Mr. Horvitz.

Richard Steven Horvitz is known for his work as the the title character Zim from the show Invader Zim. He was also the voice of the original Alpha 5 in all the Power Rangers series, as Raz in Psychonauts, Billy in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Daggett in The Angry Beavers and as Orthopox in the Destroy All Humans! series. He continues to provide the voice of Zim, albeit in mostly video games as the series was canceled in 2002.


He began voice acting in 1993, starting with voice of Alpha 5 on the live-action series Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. This is one of Richard's often-forgotten roles that he has performed. From here, he expanded into several other regular voice roles on such animated shows as The Angry Beavers (Daggett), Invader Zim (Zim), Kim Possible, Dave the Barbarian (Ned Frischman), Zatch Bell! (Kanchomé), and more recent shows like The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy (Billy, Billy's dad), Ben 10 (Grey Matter), Squirrel Boy (Rodney), and Shorty McShorts' Shorts as Dudley.

He also played the main character Razputin in Psychonauts and Orthopox in Destroy All Humans!, Destroy All Humans! 2, and Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon, in a voice that closely resembles that of Zim (rather, what would happen if Zim adopted an English accent). He has voiced various NPCs in Everquest 2. He also does the voice of the Berserker Darklings in The Darkness. He also had a minor part as a grocer that Sophie buys potatoes from in Howl's Moving Castle. Observe his credit list here.

In a behind-the-scenes style interview on the first Invader Zim DVD collection, when questioned about how hard it was to do Zim's voice (meaning all the screaming he did), he simply stated "Did I find doing the voice of Zim hard on my voice? How do I put this?...yes." He also claims his favorite line from the entire series is "You! Obey the fist!" from Career Day but his favorite exchange was in Rise of the Zitboy, where Zim angrily yells out "Why was there BACON IN THE SOAP?!"

See a sample of his work with this collection of clips from Invader Zim.