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Ralph is a heavy-handed wrecking riot with a heart. For 30 years—day in, day out—he’s been doing his job as “The Bad Guy” in the arcade game Fix-It Felix Jr. But it’s getting harder and harder to love his job when no one seems to like him for doing it. Suffering from a classic case of Bad-Guy fatigue and hungry for a little wreck-ognition, Ralph embarks on a wild adventure across an incredible arcade-game universe to prove that just because he’s a Bad Guy, it doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy. “He’s rough on the outside,” says Moore, “but he has a sweet nature to him.”
John C. Reilly was called on to provide the voice of Ralph. “When we were talking about making the main character a ‘bad guy,’” says Moore, “we knew we needed someone the audience could get behind—support and love—even though he’s kind of rough around the edges. John inhabits the characters he plays and he connects to the humanity. He brought a lot of himself to Ralph, too, which is amazing.”
Reilly actually spent time with the production team, learning about the animation process, physically acting out certain scenes to provide reference to animators and contributing his own thoughts on the level of emotion a certain moment might demand. “After we talked with John, I think everybody felt a much deeper connection with the project,” says Renato dos Anjos, animation supervisor. “He really believed in the character and he probably knows Ralph better than anyone.”
“Wreck-It Ralph is an amazing character,” says Reilly. “He has a huge heart, but he’s misguided. He has all the foibles of a real person even though he’s an arcade-game character. He means well in the beginning, but just goes about it in all the wrong ways. But in the end, he realizes what a hero really is.”
Above is the full Audio Interview with John C. Reilly during the Press Junket we recently attended. (click to play).
