ComingSoon spoke with Teen Titans Go! star Khary Payton about the upcoming crossover film Teen Titans Go! & DC Super Hero Girls: Mayhem in the Multiverse ahead of its May 24 release, as well as his roles in Metal Gear Solid 4 and The Walking Dead.
In Teen Titans Go! & DC Super Hero Girls: Mayhem in the Multiverse, the Teen Titans and DC Super Hero Girls must team up to battle Lex Luthor and his Legion of Doom as they enact a plan that could defeat even the Justice League.
Tyler Treese: So this film is super fun, and the Teen Titans Go! scenes get so meta with it. You’re calling the DC Super Hero Girls “continuity snobs.” How fun is that attitude and getting to play around with just being in a film where the meta-humor is great?
Khary Payton: Well, I think I think that’s one of the strengths of Teen Titans Go! from the very beginning. That we acknowledge the reality of our fantasy. From the very beginning, we would acknowledge the ridiculous nature of the Teen Titans situation. They’re five teenagers who are just living on an island in a building by themselves. That’s not going to go well.
The reality is that’s just going to go sideways, and I think that was the beginnings of the idea of Teen Titans Go! That if you look at it, it seems like we’re going at it from this crazy silly way that is not serious and doesn’t have any grounding in reality, but the truth is the opposite. It’s that if you look at your situation, we can be off the rails. That’s where we start, and I think just going as meta as we do is the next logical step.
One of the funniest scenes in the film has you arguing ever the pronunciation of foyer (FOY-er versus the British FOY-yay). So I have to ask, which side are you actually on?
Well, you know what, it’s a mood thing with me, man. It’s like, if you’re feeling fancy, if you’re headed to answer the door with a glass of wine in your hand, then it’s a [FOY-yay], you know? And if you just walk into the door and you’re drenched in water because you’ve been playing on your slip and slide in the backyard, then it’s a [FOY-er]. It’s all about how you’re feeling, man.
Cyborg has always been this very boisterous character. I’m really curious, how did the booyah come about? Was that improv or a written line?
No, it was a written line. The funny thing is that they were having an argument about it that first day. Somebody at Warner Bros. got booyah confused with “yaya” and thought that it was like a euphemism for drugs. They were like, “Booyah, isn’t that like, a euphemism for some drugs?” And I was like, “No! What are you talking about?”
But we had to argue for booyah because somebody thought that it meant drugs and I felt like I was … I was arguing with somebody’s grandmother who was like, “Is that drugs? Are you talking about drugs?” We were like, “No, it’s, booyah. It’s just excitement.” It was like, Stuart Scott’s been screaming booyah on ESPN for years! This is just an excited booyah. Will Friedle did it on Kim Possible before I ever started, you know?
Will is in this film as well, what’s it like getting the two booyah actors together?
Oh, man. You know, I love Will. And unfortunately, we were all kind of isolated for this recording, but I had the pleasure of becoming really close with Will when we did another cartoon together. And we had so much fun. We probably had too much fun. We barely got any work done but, yeah, the cool thing is that Will has actually written a couple of episodes of Teen Titans Go! He just, he loves the show, and we love getting him a part of it whenever we can.
You’ve been the voice of Cyborg for so many projects, even outside of the Teen Titans, including Injustice. What has really made that character so special for you and has anything changed over time?
You know, Cyborg was my first voiceover audition when I moved to Los Angeles. I just went in there excited to be able to audition. I didn’t think I would get it, but I thought that the process was so freeing and I just went in there without any expectation. Cyborg’s kind of the closest thing to me. Just a very excited, very happy to be working version of myself.
And so the subsequent versions of Cyborg seem to be just other versions of me, just in different moods really, you know? And so it’s always been really easy for me to kind of access my Cyborg side, because it always seems like it’s just been different flavors, different moods, and different sides of myself.
You voiced a few characters in the first generation of DC Superhero Girls. So how cool was it this time around getting to interact with the Lauren Faust universe this time?
Oh, man. It was cool. It was cool. And I love the kind of evolution of DC Superhero Girls. First of all, I think it’s fantastic artwork. I absolutely love the art style, and I love that it’s been given a chance to kind of have this evolution, you know? And I think that they actually work and interact with the Titans and, we’ve of course had Titans versions of all of the characters on DC Superhero Girls, so it really does feel very Titans adjacent.
I’m a huge Metal Gear Solid fan, so I wanted to ask you about voicing Drebin in MGS 4. What were your initial thoughts when you saw this character interacting with this soda-drinking, hairless monkey?
I loved it. You know, the actual look of him reminded me a lot of my brother Curtis, but if Curtis bleached his hair blonde. So I was like, “Oh man, I know this dude.” And it was very interesting too because we were recording, and really dubbing, we were watching the Japanese motion capture actors as they were being shot. They hadn’t even animated it yet, it was just seeing the motion capture actors doing their thing, and we were dubbing right over the top of that.
So that was something that I’d never done before. And also David Hayter and I did all of our scenes together, which is something that you don’t usually do in a video game. It’s usually just you in the booth by yourself. So it was a really cool interaction, you know?
You have been so great on The Walking Dead. I was so happy for you to have that success. What was it like having such a well-deserved breakthrough after decades of hard work and finally having this great live-action role?
Yeah, it was pretty cool, man. I’d done nine pilots. One that I got fired from the series, another series got canceled after one episode, and then seven more that never even made it to the screen. So, you know, I had been grinding for a while, trying to find my spot, and finally, something got into my head and I felt like I didn’t want a pilot anymore. It didn’t seem like that was working for me. I just wanted an introduction, you know? And, I mean, I couldn’t ask for a better introduction than Ezekiel. They put me on a throne with a tiger, you know? That’s … it’s hard to beat. It’s hard to beat.
Definitely. And then my last question with the huge success of The Walking Dead, it wouldn’t be out of the question to see you play a live-action hero. Is a live-action superhero something you’d want to do?
Of course, of course. I mean the fun of The Walking Dead is that I’ve had to do a lot of physical stuff, a lot of stunts, and fortunately the show has trusted me. They don’t immediately call in a stuntman anymore [laugh], they just let me do my own stunts a lot of times, and it’s been a lot of fun. And would love that, I would absolutely love that.