Voice Actor Spotlight: John DiMaggio

Bite his shiny metal ass!

It’s fun to think that the world’s laziest bending robot is also the world’s last hope for survival against the locusts. Or that Batman’s maniacal arch enemy is also fighting alongside the caped crusader himself. Or even that a spiky-haired blitz baller could also be the most commonly found cannon fodder in the Halo universe. Such is the life of voice actor John Dimaggio, the man behind many of  today’s most loved and recognizable animated and video game characters.

John Dimaggio was born September 4th, 1968 in North Plainfield, New Jersey. He was a member of the Gamma Sigma fraternity for the two years he attended the Mason Gross School of Arts at Rutgers University.

After leaving Rutgers, John launched right into his voice acting career. With a career spanning over two decades, chances are you’ve heard DiMaggio’s gravelly Jersey vocals bringing a whole new level of awesome to just about any popular game or cartoon you’ve enjoyed since 1984.

 

 

One of his first major roles as a voice actor was that of Gonza in the anime film, Princess Mononoke. From there, DiMaggio went on to provide voices for characters in shows like Johnny Bravo, Spawn and the full length, CGI feature film surprisingly not based on any of the games of the franchise with the same name, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Witihin.

DiMaggio’s first video game roles, not surprisingly dropping at the same time as the Final Fantasy film, were the roles of Wakka and Kimahri Ronso from Final Fantasy X. Save for the blitz ball segments, FFX was a huge success and spawned the first ever direct sequel in franchise history, Final Fantasy X-2, resulting in the reprisal of DiMaggio’s roles as the two aforementioned characters.

 

From there, DiMaggio’s career went on steroids. Like the illegal kind. The Scotsman from Samurai Jack, Bender from Futurama, General Grievous from Star Wars: The Clone Wars and  his most popular game voice role, Marcus Fenix of Gears of War. DiMaggio was everywhere.

The success of the Gears of War franchise ensured that DiMaggio would keep coming back for chronological sequels and copious amounts of downloadable content. Yet despite constantly chainsawing locusts in half and curb stomping his way through level after level of unbeatable odds, DiMaggio found time to voice characters in Halo 3, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Ben 10, Superman: Doomsday, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Valkyria Chronicles, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Afro Samurai… Geez, I could go on for hours…

 

While working as the voice of Leadfoot and Target in the feature film Transformers: Dark of The Moon, DiMaggio has finalized his contributions to Gears of War 3, which drops later this year. But you can rest assured John DiMaggio is far from being done working on awesome video games, anime and animated features.

If you’d like to learn more about John DiMaggio, or just see how freakin’ many projects he’s been a part of, be sure to hit up his IMDB and Wikipedia pages. It might just blow your mind.

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