Clint Eastwood has featured alongside some of the best actors who’ve ever lived. Morgan Freeman, Richard Burton, and Meryl Streep have shared celluloid with Eastwood. One connection you might not be aware of is the time Super Mario was in one of the Dirty Harry thriller movies.
The plumber himself doesn’t appear – Harry Callahan doesn’t strike us as a platform games kind of guy – but Charles Martinet, Mario’s long-time voice actor, had a bit part in 1988’s The Dead Pool. “That was a lot of fun. That was just a one-day thing out there,” Martinet told The Digital Fix. “While I was doing that, my dear friend was working as a lawyer for [Eastwood]. He saw him more often than I did. I never got to see him on the set.”
Before breaking into voice-acting, Martinet had a few smaller roles to get his footing in Hollywood. In The Dead Pool, he plays a reporter covering the police – not exactly Harry Callahan’s best pal, even if Eastwood was around. Even still, it was a lovely experience, Martinet says, and he remembers that period of his career fondly.
“We were just asking the questions,” he states of the part. “The films that I did were really fun, but they weren’t roles that would steal the show, as it were.”
Still, having a Clint Eastwood movie in your filmography ain’t half bad. Nowadays, you can find Martinet voicing everyone’s favourite plumber in just about every Mario game that comes out. He also does the voices of Luigi, Wario, and Waluigi to boot.
Still making moves in his career, he’ll be back on the big screen for Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero. Martinet voices the new villain Magenta in the anime movie, a completely new avenue of filmmaking for him.
“It’s just a tremendous experience,” he says of voicing a Dragon Ball Z character. “A new way of exercising the art and the craftsmanship. I really didn’t realise how unfamiliar I was with it until these guys brought me along.”
Our Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero review gave it four stars, and you can find out why when it opens in theatres on August 19.