Following the first couple of seasons of Invincible, a few different actors have become pretty synonymous for their roles. Steven Yeun as Mark Grayson, Gillian Jacobs as Atom Eve, Walton Goggins as Cecil, Sandra Oh as Debbie Grayson, and of course J.K. Simmons as Nolan Grayson/Omni-Man.
Ever since the animated series debuted we’ve seen Omni-Man appear in a variety of other projects, including Call of Duty and Mortal Kombat 1, and that’s partly down to the excellent performance of the character by Simmons. But Simmons wasn’t always set to play the character, as the actor recently revealed in an interview with Collider.
Simmons stated that creator Robert Kirkman originally had other ideas for who should portray the character, adding: “I didn’t know the source material. I’m not a big fan of that world on paper. They sent it to me, I read the script, and they actually originally asked me to play a different character in it. I read it and I thought, “Wow, this is really interesting for a genre that I personally am not a consumer of.”
“But at the end of the day, for a variety of reasons, it just didn’t feel — and it’s silly to say for something animated, but it didn’t feel like the right fit. Then they came back and asked me to play Nolan, and I was like, “Yeah, sure. Great. It’s a cartoon. It’ll be fun.”
If Simmons didn’t voice Omni-Man, which actor do you think would have been a good fit for the character?