Nintendo isn’t revealing Mario’s new voice actor until Wonder comes out

Nintendo’s going to let us figure out who the next voice of Mario is on our own. In an interview with IGN, Nintendo of America’s president, Doug Bowser, said that the company doesn’t plan on revealing Charles Martinet’s replacement until folks roll credits on Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

“I think people have recognized this when they see Super Mario Bros. Wonder, they’ll hear a different voice,” Bowser told IGN. “And we’ll let that play out and that’ll be within the credits, and people will learn who the new person is at that point in time, but we don’t plan to make any announcement in advance of that.”

Last month, Nintendo announced that Martinet, the longtime voice of video games’ most iconic character, would be stepping back from the role to instead be what it’s calling a Mario Ambassador. Nintendo also said that a special message from Martinet and Shigeru Miyamoto would be forthcoming, hopefully to explain what a Mario Ambassador is and to reveal who’s taking over the reigns or... plunger, as it were. Last week, Nintendo put on a 15-minute presentation for Wonder, showing off more of the game due out on October 20th. Fans thought the presentation would be a good opportunity for the new voice reveal, but now, with this interview with Bowser, we know why it didn’t happen then.

Interestingly, it seems like Martinet doesn’t quite know what a Mario Ambassador is either. First reported by Nintendo Everything, in a recent Q&A panel at GalaxyCon 2023, Martinet said of the role, “I don’t know what that is yet.”

Over the years, there have been a couple of high-profile “divorces” between characters and their longtime voice actors. In 2013, David Hayter was replaced by Kiefer Sutherland as the voice of Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid V after about 15 years in the role. According to a report from Polygon, Hayter said that the decision wasn’t his choice but conceded that the game’s director, Hideo Kojima, should always get the final say.

More recently, Bayonetta underwent a voice change from Hellena Taylor to Jennifer Hale. Taylor, who voiced Bayonetta in the series’ first two games, claimed that she didn’t take the role over what she called an “insulting” compensation offer and exhorted fans to boycott Bayonetta 3. Seemingly in response, Bayonetta’s game director and PlatinumGames’ vice president, Hideki Kamiya, tweeted, “Sad and deplorable about the attitude of untruth.” Shortly after that, a report from Bloomberg disputed Taylor’s version of events, and the actress walked back some of her statements.

While it doesn’t seem like the relationship between Martinet and Nintendo has grown that acrimonious, Martinet’s seeming uncertainty regarding his new role and Nintendo’s apparent desire to keep the new guy a secret until it literally can’t anymore seem to indicate that there’s a least some kind of disconnect.

In the GalaxyCon Q&A, Martinet also said that he still has great love of the role and that he looks forward to learning along with fans what being a Mario Ambassador means in the future.