Jean-Pierre Michaël (born September 21, 1966 in Paris) is a French actor and voice actor.
The son of actor Pierre Michael and a sociétaire (the 490th) of the Comédie-française stage institution, he has played in more than 40 stage plays, mostly from the classic French repertoire. What he is most well known for however is his voice acting, a field in which he is very busy. To wit, he is the usual French voice of Brad Pitt (since The Devil's Own, and including the Ocean's Eleven series), Keanu Reeves (most famously as Thomas A. Anderson/Neo and John Wick), Ethan Hawke, Michael Fassbender (most famously as Erik Lensherr/Magneto), Brendan Hines, Timothy Olyphant and Damian Lewis.
He has also dubbed Ben Affleck (sharing duties with Boris Rehlinger more recently), Jude Law, James Frain, Karl Urban (most notably as Éomer, Judge Joseph Dredd and Billy Butcher), Scott Speedman, Jim Caviezel, and Jack Davenport (James Norrington) more than once.
As for live-action television, his best known acting role is police Commandant Marc Venturi in a French CSI ripoff, the Cop Show / Forensic Drama RIS police scientifique. He played the role from 2006 to 2009.
Tropes & Trivia:
- Dueling Dubs: He's been part of the 2001 redub of Superman: The Movie, replacing Pierre Arditi as Clark Kent/Superman.
- The Other Darrin: He replaced Bruno Choël (Ewan McGregor's usual dub voice) as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the fifth and sixth seasons of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Choël then came back for the seventh) before voicing General Hux in the Sequel Trilogy films. Choël, meanwhile, came back for the voice cameos in the Sequel Trilogy and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
- The Pete Best:
- He's not the first to have dubbed Brad Pitt (Emmanuel Karsen is), but French people can't imagine someone else at it.
- Ditto for Keanu Reeves. Éric Legrand (yes, that one), Lionel Henry and some others dubbed him first, but he's clearly the most popular and prolific at it.
- William Coryn was the first to dub Ben Affleck. Michaël, meanwhile, has voiced him the most and most recognizably.
