How a former San Francisco stage actor’s voice ended up in Pixar’s new Disney Plus hit ‘Luca’

Sign up for our Remote Control newsletter to receive our best streaming stories of the week in your inbox.

On the list of dream jobs, voicing a Pixar character is as high as the house in “Up.” The Emeryville animation studio has a sterling reputation for creativity, so Marco Barricelli, a former actor at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, didn’t think twice when he received the call to audition for their latest film “Luca.”

The plot may give viewers flashbacks to “The Little Mermaid.” “Luca” takes place in a small town on the coast of Italy where the titular character (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) is a teenage sea creature bored with life underwater. Against his parents’ wishes, he makes his way to the surface and finds that he transforms into a human boy once he dries off. There he meets Alberto, another sea creature who has chosen a life on land. In true Italian fashion, the pair become obsessed with Vespas and enter a triathlon alongside their new human friend Daniela (Maya Rudolph) in hopes of using the prize money to buy a scooter to travel the world.

Luca and others like him live in secrecy, but the townspeople do occasionally spot the “sea monsters” and react with fear and anger. Daniela’s father, voiced by Barricelli, is a burly one-armed fisherman on high alert for the merpeople, but he unknowingly welcomes the pair of boys into his home (in human form) once he realizes they have a natural knack for finding the best fishing spots. 

Barricelli has done voiceovers before, but he wasn’t exactly camping outside Pixar’s offices looking for work. He acted at the A.C.T. from 1997 to 2005, performing in everything from “A Streetcar Named Desire” to “Glengarry Glen Ross,” then made his way to Santa Cruz, where he served as the artistic director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz through 2013 before heading to San Diego, where he now teaches at UC San Diego.

His partner was recruited as a language consultant on “Luca,” which is cacio’d and pepe’d with Italian words. Even though the Italian dialogue is scattered and silly at best (“santa mozzarella!”), they prioritized Italian speakers for the roles that didn’t go to marquee talent like Jim Gaffigan or Sacha Baron Cohen. Barricelli’s partner suggested him for the role, and after a series of auditions, he scored the part.

“It was a big huge giant gift, because it was in the height of the pandemic,” says Barricelli. “This sort of perfect job came up where I just went into a studio, basically alone except for an engineer. [The Pixar crew] were all on a big Zoom screen.”

It took between five and seven sessions to record his lines. As opposed to stage acting, where each night is a new chance to improve a scene, voiceover work is a marathon of repetition, delivering the same line 50 times to give the producers enough material to work with. 

“For an hour, you’re clearing your throat or grunting or sneezing. You’re doing that over and over again, and it’s just a blast,” says Barricelli.

In another big departure from Barricelli’s typical work, there were no other actors present. All the conversations were edited together in post-production. Aside from a rough three-second clip, he didn’t even really know what his character looked like until the trailer dropped. The script was all he had to go by, a surprising parallel to stage acting.

“You just follow the words, and that’s kind of the process with Shakespeare, too. The words in Shakespeare are of course the action. In this kind of situation, the words had to be everything,” says Barricelli. “I was really glad that my background was in heightened text. I felt like I knew how to spin the language in such a way that it might work for whatever their needs were. I didn’t feel locked in.”

Although he did experience a bit of torture at having to spend a full day singing Italian opera (very poorly), overall, the experience was just as magical as one might expect, Barricelli said.

“Those Pixar people are very happy people and it’s just so nice to be in a room with that when there’s all this creative energy bouncing off the walls. It was just pure joy.”