“It’s humbling because I stood on the shoulders of giants,” the actor says of following in Walt Disney’s footsteps and voicing Mickey on TV and at Disneyland
While Chris Diamantopoulos currently stars as a mobster on The Sticky, he also lends his voice to one very famous children’s icon: Mickey Mouse.
The actor, known for his work on The Office and Silicon Valley, is also a voice actor with many credits, including the 2013-2019 animated series Mickey Mouse and its 2020-2023 followup, The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse.
Diamantopoulos, 49, says it’s a surreal feeling to know that he’s one of only five people in Disney’s 101-year history to be cast as the voice of the brand’s official mascot. (A few others have subbed in or briefly voiced Mickey.)
“It’s so strange. I mean, honestly, there are a lot of things in my career that, if you had told me when I was a kid that I would be doing them, I might sort of think, ‘wow, I could see that,’” he says. But playing Mickey Mouse was “a massive left turn.”
“It’s humbling because I stood on the shoulders of giants,” he adds. “I feel incredibly fortunate. I’m a really, really lucky guy.”
“I barely finished high school, and for me to be the fifth voice in history after Walt [Disney], to voice Mickey Mouse, I wear that like a badge of honor,” he says. The other long-term Mickeys have been Disney, Wayne Allwine, Bret Iwan and Les Perkins.
Diamantopoulos credits “brilliant” animator Paul Rudish and all of the Disney writers and animation team for Mickey’s indefatigable appeal. “The voice is Mickey. But the expressions that you see that Mickey gets to do…that’s all by virtue of the brilliant talent of these hardworking and not-often-advertised writers and animators.”
“There’s something about this incarnation of Mickey that I think is the freest Mickey,” he adds.
Along with voicing Mickey for TV, he also speaks and sings as Mickey for the Disneyland ride Mickey’s Magic Railway, the park’s first ride focused on the mascot. “It was just so much fun,” he says.
It’s especially sweet since he can take his children when they visit the park. Diamantopoulos and his wife, Becki Newton, share one son and three daughters. “I get to take my kids to this ride where they hear my voice and they see me, and I’m guiding them through, he says. “Can you even imagine what a dream that is?”
“Every time I get to voice Mickey, it reminds me of why I got into this business: because of the magic, that intangible, beautiful feeling that we have when we fall into the fantasy world.”
His latest project, The Sticky, fulfills that dream in a very different way.
The new Prime Video series follows Diamantopoulos’ mobster Mike Byrne, Margo Martindale’s maple syrup farmer Ruth Landry, and Guillaume Cyr’s security guard Remy Bouchard as they team up to pull off a multi-million dollar heist on Quebec’s maple syrup surplus.
“We all want to watch something that takes us away,” he says. The Sticky is “going to take them away, and it’s going to take them into the place that makes them go, ‘What in God’s name did I just watch?’”
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The Sticky season 1 is now available to stream on Prime Video.
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