You might not expect the actor who plays the stunningly vulgar Al Swearengen to be a good fit for family programming, but the DreamWorks crew has other ideas for Ian McShane. The unpleasant head of "Deadwood" will be stepping into the voice booths for both "Shrek 3" and "Kung Fu Panda."
From ComingSoon.net: "They’ve done Captain Hook before like in the background playing the piano, but Captain Hook finally speaks, so it’s something my grandkids can finally see," he told us. "It’s very strange doing those things, because you usually go in… I think I’ve done three days and I’ve got another day to do… you don’t meet anybody else, you do all your lines on your own. But there are all these animators, 17 nerds, looking at you from the screen. They’re very nice, because it’s an extraordinary place. DreamWorks have this incredible campus out in Glendale, they call it "nerd heaven" and they only do animation there, it’s beautiful. They try to physically adapt the character a little to what you do when they’re doing the drawings."
"Then [Jeffrey] Katzenberg asked me in to do this ‘Kung Fu Panda,’ which we haven’t started yet, with Dustin Hoffman and Jack Black, and I play the bad Tai Lung, the evil snow leopard," he continued. "What they’ve done now is extraordinary. I went in and the director said, ‘We’d like to show you something’ and they’d taken a scene from the first series of ‘Deadwood’ where I stamp on Trixie’s neck and beat the crap out of her, and they animated it and transferred it to the leopard in the series."
