SDCC 2015: Phil Morris, From ‘Smallville’ and ‘Seinfeld’ on Voice Acting, Kung-Fu, and ‘Real Fake History’

If the worlds of pop culture were real, then that time giant kaiju leveled Hong Kong in Pacific Rim or the Crazy 88 massacre in Kill Bill would be significant, cultural watershed moments in the national psyche. Imagine the documentaries! Well, someone did.

Enter: Real Fake History. Founded on the premise that pop culture really happened, Real Fake History lovingly apes the Ken Burns-style documentary and examines fake history as if they were, well, real.

As with all Ken Burns-esque documentaries — however satirical — , the narrator is a major component, and the show’s producers did no wrong casting the legendary Philip Morris.

The son of Greg Morris from Mission: Impossible, Phil Morris has starred in Seinfeld as attorney Jackie Chiles and Smallville as J’onn, the Martian Manhunter. But he has also had a career in voice acting, with his deep, velvet sound providing the chords for shows like Green Lantern: The Animated Series, Dead Space: Downfall, and The Secret Saturdays.

On the Saturday of the 2015 San Diego Comic-Con, I had just finished watching Phil and a slew of other prolific cartoon voice actors slay a packed crowd attending the “Cartoon Voices 1” panel. They performed an abridged The Wizard of Oz to the delight of everyone — I especially lost it when Eric Bauza used his Puss in Boots voice for Dorothy’s uncle — but Phil was a standout as the Lion and Oz himself.

One thing you need to know about Philip: He’s a dyed-in-the-wool nerd. He loves Comic-Con, and has relished his roles like J’ohnn in shows like Smallville. He’s seen geek culture change, evolve, and proliferate throughout the years; he can’t believe how big it’s become either.

After the panel, I sat down with Philip to talk about what we can expect from Real Fake History, his time as a voice actor, and the complicated, important intersections of race in geek culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNOBHZ7FYUE

How different is it playing a documentary narrator in Real Fake History versus your other voice over roles?

Phil: It’s really not that different. It was just honoring the structure of it because it’s a bit of a mockumentary. It’s based on the whole Ken Burns documentary style and I’m a huge Ken Burns fan, huge. I love it all, America, Baseball, Jazz, Civil War.

You’ve seen the jazz one?

Phil: I’ve seen almost all of them, The Roosevelt’s, I love it all. National Parks, one of my favorite. I’m huge on that. I’m a big narrator fan. My Dad, Greg Morris, was a huge narrator. He did the first Mercedes Benz commercials and Chrysler commercials, so that was the voice you heard. He was also in the original Mission Impossible as Barney Collier, so voice over and narration has been part of my life since I can remember. I’ve worked with Keith David and I’m friends with Keith David and since he’s one of the major narrators of all the Ken Burns stuff, I’m honoring him as well with all this.

What can you tell me about Real Fake History?

Phil: Real Fake History takes the conceit that comics, TV shows, movies, that universe, whatever it is we’re talking about, Walking Dead, Kill Bill, whatever it is, that it actually happened. In that reality, we have bystanders, eyewitness accounts, which is really bizarre, and then I narrate with incredible integrity. The happenings on Endor, or with The Bride in Kill Bill and the Crazy 88’s.

It’s very exciting.

Phil: Oh, but it’s very real, you know what I mean? Every so often we make a little left turn and we do a little bit of a wink, but not a steady diet of it because it would kill it. You’ve got to see it. It’s very, very clever. Very clever stuff.

That’s a tight line to walk because it is hilarious that we’re going to talk seriously about giant robots tearing up Hong Kong. How difficult is it to tread that line?

Phil: I don’t know if it was difficult, but it was challenging. I think the challenge was in not letting the joke out before you set the hook. Do you know what I mean? That’s the key to this show is you’ve got to set that hook, you’ve got to make people believe, “What, is this real? Is this? Oh, no. Okay.” Then they get the joke and they go along with it, but you’ve got to set that hook. Setting the hook is in the integrity with which they bring it out. It’s really, really clever.

What’s been your favorite episode?

Phil: I think it might be the Kill Bill one. It’s one of my favorite movies, number one. The Crazy 88’s is one of my favorite, that whole scene, that whole katana scene, one of my favorite scenes, number two. The way that we address it in Real Fake History, as though one of the surviving Crazy 88’s is giving an account of this, it’s bananas ridiculous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64RyMzXe4fg

On Kill Bill, you say it’s one of your favorite movies, I understand you also are actually a practicing martial artist. You study wing chun.

Phil: Wing chun kung fu.

Can you tell me very briefly how you got started in that? I think that is really fascinating to me.

Phil: Thank you. Well my Dad, Greg Morris, from the original Mission Impossible, when they first started that show, they were told to go take a self defense class because they were one of the first TV shows to use martial arts moves in the show. They wanted them to know what they were. They went and studied with a man named Bruce Tegner on Sunset Boulevard. I was six, I went and trained with them. I was into it. I was really skinny and I got hurt a lot. It was great, but it wasn’t necessarily for a six year old at that time. Even though I was introduced to it then, it didn’t stick until much later and I started studying with Bong Soo Han, who was a Hapkido master and he choreographed the Billy Jack movies, just fantastic, passed away a few years ago.

I stayed with him, got my green belt, or my blue belt, or whatever it was. I bounced out of that, girls, comic books, or sports, or something else. Later, I was a huge Bruce Lee fan early on, as we all were, the kids my age. I’d always wanted to study wing chun because I’d heard the wing chun was his mother art, which he then extrapolated out to ge kong do and created that. I’d never found a wing chun studio until one day I’m in LA and it’s raining and I see on Venice Boulevard a wing chun studio, I pull in. This Asian guy comes downstairs and that ended up being my masters, his name is Hawkins Cheung, I’ve been with him 30 years. I’m in two hall of fames, I teach every Sunday morning in Burbank at 8:00, and wing chun is part of my soul, part of my spirit.

We just came from the voice acting panel, I told you on the way here, it was hysterical. You’re both a screen and voice actor. They’re different disciplines, but there are similarities. What do you find enriching about voice acting that you can’t do in screen and vise versa?

Phil: In voice acting, I can be more characters than I can look like in front of the camera. My voice, depending on what they are looking for from me, I can be a kid, I can be a dog, I can be an Asian bus driver, I can be a Jamaican DJ. I can be so many things with my voice that I can’t be physically because my physicality is limited. There is that. What I like about voice acting too are the people. The people that I meet, as you saw on the panel, are incredibly talented. Their references go everywhere. They have to because then they’re called on when the voice director wants them to do something to reach into that catalog and pull it out.

They have a wealth of knowledge, a wealth of interest, a wealth of passions that move them and they’re able then to convert that into a vocal ease. On camera is different. People are more bound by what they look like obviously. There’s more ego I think involved in the on camera because it is a full representation of who you are. Whereas voice acting, it’s a representation of the artist and your voice, but mainly the artist’s rendition.

When I’m doing Jackie Chiles or I’m doing a Disney show or any show, that’ me. People see me. They relate to me directly, there’s no indirectness to it, it’s very direct. I rather like it more. I rather like that walking and talking three dimensional field of face acting as opposed to vocal acting more. People have asked me what I like more, I think I like being in front of the camera more. I don’t know quite why.

You talked about this on the panel, which really struck me: minorities in Hollywood. It’s is a very powerful subject to me as well. Your father was one of the pioneering black performers in his era.

Yes.

You’ve also played super heroes, that’s a hot topic lately. They call it race bending. Michael B. Jordan is playing Johnny Storm and people lit a fire, so to speak about that.

Phil: No pun intended! [laughs]

Nope, not intended. But what is your opinion on someone who has also played super heroes and is also a performer of color?

Phil: We have enough renditions of the traditional super heroes throughout the ages. You know what I mean? Where did they come from? They came from somebody’s imagination, somebody’s creativity. That’s all this is. It’s another branch of creativity and expression that is pure. The politicization of this does it a disservice. It hampers the creator into thinking I can only make Johnny Storm a white, blond haired, blue eyed guy because that’s how Stanley and Jack Kirby initially created this character. Okay, that’s what those creators thought about it.

Now we have other creators that have come along in the generation since who go, “Man, this is my take on this particular character.” Why are you going to hamper the creativity of these other creators who have a different take on it because we’re so culturally tied to certain things. It does us a disservice as a people, as a species that we’re not able to open our minds to accept. People ask me all the time, what character would you want to play?

That was going to be my next question.

Phil: Traditionally, I’m always going Black Panther … blah, blah, why, because they’re black? Yes, that’s my limitation. In coming to Comic-Con today, I literally thought about who I’d want to play, I’d want to play Captain America. I think we need a new Captain America.

I think so too.

Phil: With a new ego’s that reflects today’s morality, today’s dilemmas. Back when Captain America was created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon … it was to answer the desperate of the war. Hitler, Togo, Mussolini, and Stalin. He was our representation of what America could do to stop the Axis powers. He came out of that time, he was a hero for that age. We need a new hero for our age. One that represents this pan of racial community that America has become. Until we do that, until we demystify these stereotypes and we knock down these cultural barriers, we should always have cultural identity and awareness and respect and honor, but not barriers.

That it keeps us from understanding and honoring other cultures. From travelling into those other areas to inform me more about who I am. Dude, you’re going to get me on a soap box here, but that’s how I feel about this. That’s why I think this Michael B. Jordan thing’s fantastic. Fantastic, bring it man. Bring more. Bring me a black dare devil, you know what I mean? I’m serious.

On the subject of super heroes now, you’re clearly very passionate about nerd culture, geek culture. You must of seen this culture proliferate. Could you have ever predicted that was where we were going to be?

Phil: No way, no way, and anybody who says they could’ve, they’re lying. Stan Lee couldn’t see this, you know what I mean? Carmen Fantina couldn’t see it. These guys and girls that spawn this industry are so fantastic, but there’s just no way you could of seen that technology would catch up to filmmaking so that you could represent a hero on screen seamlessly without us seeing the wires and the trampolines and all that stuff that they had to use before.

Now even the casual fan can be fully immersed and taken away in a way … cinematically that we could never do before. That has all changed. Bringing a comic book from the newsstand to the big screen is a lot easier. Bringing it to the small screen is even easier. Where as before you could only go to the big screen because of budgets and the film constraints. Now all of that stuff is fairly nominal to spend money on those effects. You can bring it to the small screen like we did in Smallville, it’s a great effect, they’re doing in Arrow like they do in The Flash. You see these shows on television becoming very successful because the technology is able to match the image and the concepts.

About Smallville because people have fond memories of that, what’s your fondest memory of working on Smallville as the Martian Manhunter?

Phil: My fondest memory honestly is meeting Allison Mack for the first time. Allison Mack was so kind to me my very first day. So supportive to me. She was like the greeter, unofficial, but she was the first person I met. If anyone knows Allison Mack, you’ll raise your hand, you know what I’m talking about is a true. She is one of the sweetest, smartest women, talented woman I’ve ever met. To meet her first was probably a great blessing because she really welcomed me and she kind of gave me the lay of the land, [because I] hadn’t met Tom yet.

Because I am a fan, I was more anxious doing this show than any other probably because I am a fan. I needed to measure up to my own fandom, but I knew there was a great fan base that was going to look at me and go, “Man, is this our John Jones or is this guy just a scumblebum. That to me, meeting Allison on that first day and having her be so gracious, so welcoming, set the tone for the whole experience I had up in Vancouver doing Smallville.

You’ve had a very prolific career from voice acting to screen acting. What’s been the one most rewarding thing about it when you look back? Not that you’re over it yet.

Phil: The fact that I get to do it. That sounds trite maybe, but there’s a lot of talented people in the world and the fact that I came from my father was no guarantee that I was going to have any talent, number one. Or that doors would open, number two. My father being who he was did not guarantee any of that. He didn’t help in any way. They spend money on you, you’ve got to perform for them. Not your father, not your mother, not your aunt, not your uncle. That’s why I say being in this business and continuing to work is the blessing.

I’m diverse. I like comedy, I like drama, I like Internet stuff, I like big screen, I like small screen. If it’s good, I’m probably there. If it’s a good solid crew that’s working, I’m probably going to be there. I find that’s a blessing. The more I work, the more I find that I’m blessed because I find so many people get off the train, they quit, it discourages them. They can’t make enough money. I have not had that problem and I look at that as a great blessing.

Last words about Real Fake History, what we can look forward to in this upcoming season?

Phil: Watch them all. They’re all funny and comment, comment, comment. Like them. Don’t like them. Do whatever it is you feel. I can’t tell you how to feel. I just know they’re really, really funny and I like them a lot.

Real Fake History can be found on YouTube by Machinima. Their newest episode, “The Battle of Castle Black,” can be found below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heK04CCJzVI