Newly Minted Disney Legend Alan Tudyk Reveals the One Voice He Can’t Do
Hint: It's actually one he's done before. Sort of.
Alan Tudyk has voiced 19 characters in 14 Disney animated films, and he’s still counting. It’s no wonder he was recently anointed as a Disney Legend at the 2026 D23 convention, honored alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda, Anne Hathaway, and Dwayne Johnson, to name a few. His Disney credits are so expansive — ranging from King Candy in 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph to K-2SO in Rogue One (2016) — you’d be forgiven for thinking there is no role this man can’t play. But, as Tudyk told Fandango Front Row correspondent Nikki Novak one day before the Disney Legend Ceremony, there is one thing he can’t do: “My goat isn’t great.”
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It’s an ironic statement coming from the man who is beloved for voicing the non-speaking chicken Heihei in Moana (2016), not to mention the fact that he did, in fact, star as baby goat Valentino in Wish (2023). Granted, that was a talking goat, and the low voice he found for the character worked just fine. “It was both hardest and easiest,” Tudyk said of his work voicing Valentino. “I was scared that I wasn’t going to be able to do it, and then when we landed on that [voice] it became really fun and the character really came alive.”
Despite being both the hardest and easiest character to play, Valentino isn’t Tudyk’s favorite of his Disney characters. That spot is reserved for his first major Disney voiceover role. “I do have a favorite,” he told Novak. “It’s King Candy because he was my first and he had such a good arc and I love the movie Wreck-It-Ralph.”
It was his work as King Candy that kicked off his recent run of voice roles in Disney Animation. He’s voiced characters in every single Disney animated movie since, playing both humans and animals, from the Duke of Weselton in Frozen (2013) to the Toucan in Encanto (2021). In less than 15 years, he’s gone from co-star of Wreck-It Ralph to certified Disney legend, something he admitted to Novak he never saw coming. “I didn’t start my voiceover career until I was 40, and in the last 15 years that’s become such a huge part of my life,” he said at D23. “So, if you’re out there and you’re thinking, ‘What’s it going to be? When is it going to happen?’ You don’t know. And this is one that I didn’t really choose, it just sort of happened, which just makes it that much more special.”
Check out Tudyk’s entire conversation with Front Row’s Novak to hear him reveal how a “white guy from Texas” ended up playing a chicken in Moana and why he was skeptical to join the Star Wars franchise as K-2SO.
