PEPPA Pig’s voice actor has been replaced by an unknown, to the outrage of the great British stage actors who auditioned and failed. Here they are:
Sir Patrick Stewart
Renowned as one of the greats even though he’s known solely for playing Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek and didn’t even do a French accent for that, Stewart was desperate for the role and would have claimed it was ‘for his grandchildren’.
Dame Judi Dench
An actress whose career choices are even more mercenary than Sir Michael Caine’s, Dench intended to refer to Peppa as ‘porcine royalty’ and to take it all very seriously while demanding none of the other voice actors make eye contact.
Sir Ian McKellen
Famous for heavyweight roles like King Lear, Gandalf and Magneto, McKellen thought he had ‘the Swine’ in the bag after intoning ‘You shall not pass’ at Madame Gazelle. Planned to call it ‘tremendous fun’ on chat shows while trousering £1.2m per episode.
Dame Maggie Smith
Could bring a staunch Britishness to the part like no other, as she did to Downton Abbey, but would be unable to hide her clear contempt for the scripts and especially Pedro Pony. Child viewers would feel belittled.
Dame Emma Thompson
Would throw herself embarrassingly into the role, insisting on performing her own snorts, having thoroughly disabused herself of the notion anything was beneath her after Last Christmas. Fired after six episodes because kids hate her even more than adults do.
