X-Men ‘97 took the world by storm (pun intended) in March of this year with universal acclaim for the revival of the beloved animated series that ran from 1992-1997. One character that quickly became beloved in the new iteration was the shape-shifting, wise-cracking hero Morph, voiced by JP Karliak, who we had the chance to sit down with for a bite-sized interview on Actors With Issues to talk about his career, his early days as a stage actor, X-Men’s legacy and bringing queer and non-binary representation to the forefront, and advice for actors looking to get into voiceover.
“I was under the impression that nobody actually gets paid to do voiceover. It was too much fun,” he laughed. “It must be something that they let you do, so you have to be famous on-camera first, and then they let you do voiceover. I did a few bit roles [on-camera] and just found that voiceover allowed me to do so many different characters whereas on-camera was getting more and more narrow in terms of what they were seeing me as, so I left that behind and started doing voiceover full time.”
With over 100 IMDb credits and 400+ episodes of animated television and dozens of videogames and animated films under his belt, JP’s career has spanned genres and franchises, voicing iconic characters like Fortnite’s The Dealer, Boss Baby (taking the role over from Alec Baldwin in 2018), Spider-Man villain the Green Goblin, and The Joker in the 2024 videogame Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League.
“The Joker is a field of landmines that are iconic performances,” he said of taking on the role. “I think the benefit I had was that this was an Elseworlds Joker. I wasn’t doing any particular Joker that’s been done before, so I got to do my own thing while pulling in bits from other iconic Jokers, so it still felt like him. It’s always scary, there will always be people that hate it, but I had a good time.”
Another franchise JP has had several roles in is that of Star Wars animated series The Bad Batch and Star Wars: Visions, which he shared are among his favorite iterations of Star Wars, a not-to-unpopular opinion these days. “I think it’s some of the best Star Wars [content] and it’s so rich and I was so emotional with the finale of The Bad Batch a couple of months ago. It was really special to be part of that because I’ve been a fan of it for so many years, from The Clone Wars on.”
Like many Marvel-related auditions, JP’s audition for X-Men ‘97 was given ‘dummy sides’, fake scenes written with the character in mind, but no specific names or plots to avoid any leaks. “It was Steve or Bill or something, but I had an inkling of what it was, so I asked the casting director ‘Is this what I think it is?’” he explained. “The more I read into it, the more I felt it was going to be important, not just to the Marvel universe but to this fan base as a whole.”
“When you’re recording, you don’t really have a sense of what this is going to be, how big or how successful. You can only go off the bits of the script that you’re reading. We had an inkling because of the pedigree of the 90s series that it was going to be decent, but it was earth-shattering how good it was. To see the way that it resonates with people at conventions or on social media, them or their kids being queer, and we’re not even doing that much. We just identified that Morph is non-binary but we’re not doing special story hours to really hammer it home. We’re just saying ‘This is Morph, this is who he is’ and that’s enough. He’s got a lot more to do than to stand in a room and ‘be non-binary’ there are other things going on!”
Watch our full conversation with JP Karliak above, and head to Disney+ to stream the first season of X-Men ‘97.