Young Actor Puts Acting Gills To Work In Voicing 'Nemo'
'Finding Nemo' Gould's First Voice Role
Tim Lammers, Web Staff EditorI'm not going to tell you whether or not the Clown Fish Marlin finds his son Nemo in the new Disney-Pixar family comedy "Finding Nemo" -- that's something you'll have to find out for yourself.
But as for the person who provides the voice for Nemo -- he's been found in Southern California, and he's an excited young man named Alexander Gould.
Gould is the central character of film as Nemo, the spawn of an over-protective father, Marlin (Albert Brooks), who is struggling with the fact that his son is growing up. Tired of his father's worrisome ways, Nemo defies orders from his father while on a school field trip in the Great Barrier Reef, and is captured by a diver.
Enlisting the help of Dory, a happy-go-lucky fish with a short-term memory problem, Marlin embarks on a journey to find Nemo -- who is now part of a rag-tag bunch of fish (including Willem Dafoe, Brad Garrett and Allison Janney) in an aquarium overlooking the Sydney Harbor in Australia.
The quest to find "Nemo" in theaters has been a long time coming for Disney-Pixar fans, considering the film has been 2.5 years in the making. That's an enormous amount of time for a film production, considering an average feature film takes approximately 10 weeks to shoot.
Gould, 9, has every right to be excited, considering he's voicing the title character in a film certain to become another Disney-Pixar film classic, along with its other computer-animated predecessors "Toy Story," "Toy Story 2," "A Bug's Life" and "Monsters, Inc."
"I started actually a year and a half ago, but I only did two days here and another day there, so it was just little bits at a time," Gould told me in an @ The Movies interview.
But, Gould said, his initial audition for "Finding Nemo" happened long before that, and it provided him with a long bout of anticipation.
"It's a really long process. I had to do the audition and then a year later, we finally got a call saying, 'We would like him to go on a callback.,'" Gould recalled. "We knew other people who had already gone on a callback and we thought, you know, it was over. Then at the callback there was no one else there except for me. I read at the callback, and then two months after that, I got the job."
And when Gould found out that he got the role, he reacted as any actor would, whether they're a young kid, or a kid at heart.
"I jumped around the house 50 times," he said enthusiastically.
An actor since age 2, Gould is certainly no stranger to the business. And while he's appeared on such television shows as "Malcolm in the Middle," "Freaks and Geeks," "Ally McBeal" and "Even Stevens," -- as well as films like Wes Craven's "They" -- "Finding Nemo" found Gould diving into the world of animation voice work for the first time.
Unlike his previous acting gigs, Gould soon found out that he'd essentially be working alone in doing his voice role for "Finding Nemo." In fact, it's standard practice in the animation industry for actors to voice their roles in the studio at separate times from their colleagues.
Naturally, it was a new challenge for the young actor, but needless to say, he slipped into the scales of Nemo quite comfortably and let his acting gills -- er, skills -- take over.
"Actually, it was pretty easy because it's just like reading a script," Gould explained to me. "They have your lines and you just like do the same line three times and if they don't like the three ways that you did it, you do it another three times. Sometimes you have to do one line three times at a time, up to 12 times."
And, he added, there are other benefits to doing voice roles over live-action roles.
"I like working with the voice roles better because you don't have to deal with the wardrobe or the sets and you can just come in and you can be dressed in jeans and a T-shirt," Gould quipped.
Oddly enough, Gould didn't meet any of his fellow voice cast members until the press junket for the film in mid-May. Among those he chatted with were his screen father Marlin (Brooks), his search companion Dory (DeGeneres) and Dafoe, who plays the leader of his buddies in the Sydney aquarium tank.
" All of them are just really, really nice," Gould said. "Ellen DeGeneres is really funny, and her character Dory is really funny too -- my favorite part in the movie is when Dory speaks whale."
Gould also called Dafoe "one of the nicest guys I've ever met," and said Brooks was "pretty nice," too.
"He has one kid of his own, so he was sort of like a dad," Gould added.
As a fan of all of Disney-Pixar's feature films, Gould's experience in "Finding Nemo" is one that he will not soon forget. He has constant reminders of the film around his house in the form of "Nemo" movie toys and games -- one of the cool benefits of being in a family-friendly movie.
"It is really weird. There are plush toys everywhere, video games, little McDonald's toys -- there's all sorts of that stuff," Gould said. "They're just really weird to have -- my character in a toy. Some of the toys have my voice with it. So, that's also weird to have a plush toy that my sister's gonna keep on her bed and play with every day -- and my voice is gonna come out of it!"
As a personal benefit, Gould's experience in "Finding Nemo" has sparked a new interest -- snorkeling. Up until now, he's gone to the beach on the California coast to build sandcastles and play in the water. But now, he has much bigger plans.
"I've never been to Hawaii or somewhere like that where you can really go snorkeling, but I am taking a trip up to Hawaii this year, so I'm hoping I'll get to go snorkeling then and see all the coral reefs," Gould said.
Until then, he's got a little reminder of underwater life to fuel his fascination.
"I have one fish and it's gold -- it's a Beta," Gould told me.
And the boy who voices Nemo knows just where to find him -- in a fishbowl at home.
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