Wendell Pierce, star of The Wire and Suits, has launched a campaign to voice Family Guycharacter Cleveland Brown.
Mike Henry, the actor who originally voiced Cleveland in the hit animated comedy, recently announced he was stepping down from the role to let a black actor take his place.
“It’s been an honour to play Cleveland on Family Guy for 20 years,” he tweeted last week. “I love this character, but persons of colour should play characters of colour. Therefore, I will be stepping down from the role.”
Pierce, who won acclaim for playing Detective Bunk Moorland in The Wire, and for his recent pre-lockdown stint in London’s West End playing Willy Lowman in The Death of a Salesman, announced on Twitter that he wanted to take over Henry’s role.
He wrote: “Now that Mike Henry has consciously given up the role of Cleveland, I am publicly starting a campaign to voice the role myself on The Cleveland Show.”
The Cleveland Show was a Family Guy spin-off which ran for four seasons from 2009 to 2013. When The Cleveland Show was cancelled, the character of Cleveland returned to Family Guy.
It’s not been confirmed whether Pierce would pursue the role as a supporting character in Family Guy, or whether it would be contingent on reviving his own series.
Family Guy has previously cast dramatic actors in supporting roles before; for instance, The Sopranos‘ Tony Sirico has voiced the tough-guy dog Vinny in several episodes of the long-running cartoon.
Seth MacFarlane’s cartoon isn’t the only series re-evaluating its own racial politics. The Simpsons recently announced that it would no longer have non-white characters be voiced by white actors.
