The voices behind Dreamworks’ The Bad Guys 2 crashed San Diego Comic Con Saturday morning to offer a preview of next month’s sequel to the the animation studio’s 2022 sleeper hit The Bad Guys. Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Craig Robinson, Anthony Ramos, and Awkwafina, who voice Wolf, Snake, Shark, Pirahna, and Webs, respectively, talked shop and their recording process while promoting what’s next for the newly-reformed set of lawbreakers, who made their debut in a series of children’s books before being adapted for the big screen.
Old habits die hard, and while the 2022 original ended with Wolf and his team turning over a new leaf, not everyone is so quick to forget. “Well, it’s straight time for the bad guys They’re out of the joint, they’ve got a probation officer. They’re trying to find employment.”
Unemployment may be the least of the Bad Guys’ worries, though: their reformation has created a power vacuum in the animal underworld that is a new group of criminals — the all-female Bad Girls, which consists of Danielle Brooks, Natasha Lyonne, and Maria Bakalova (also in attendance) — is all too eager to fill. Soon, the Bad Guys find themselves drawn back into their old ways, this time with an ulterior motive: sabotage.
SDCC audiences were also among the first to view some exclusive clips of the sequel, one which surrounds the Bad Guys as they battle with a masked Nacho Libre-styled luchador for a championship wrestling belt, and another which sees them perform some physics-defying feats while trying to board a rocket piloted by the trio of Bad Girls mid-launch.
As moderator Kevin McCarthy revealed, many of the sound effects used in action scenes like the rocket launch are derived from asking voice actors to do a series of moans and grunts in the booth. Awkwafina’s favorite example of this, for example, involved trying to imitate falling down ten flights of stairs and being zapped with 10,000 volts.
Finally, the actors talked inspiration, and the movies that made them want to be actors.
Maria: The Lion King
Natasha: Glory and Hoffa
Danielle: Dreamgirls
Sam: The Deer Hunter
Marc: Deliverance
Awkwafina: Male Jiggalo
Craig Robinson: Friday
Anthony: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
