Karl Wiedergott
Karl Wiedergott is an actor, born 1969.
Somebody has to voice the man in the crowd, the second cop, the news anchor with one line, and on The Simpsons for twelve years that somebody was frequently Wiedergott. He joined in 1998, filled out more than two hundred episodes with background characters and the occasional celebrity impression, John Travolta and Bill Clinton among them, and made his last appearance in the season 22 episode Donnie Fatso.
It is a job with no fame attached and a real craft inside it. A small principal cast cannot populate an entire town, so the utility voice has to sound like a different person every time and never like a performance, because the moment an audience notices the one-line character, the joke has gone.
The rest of the record is short. A Mac designer in Pirates of Silicon Valley, a role called Homer in Breakfast of Champions, a pancake house waiter in the 1988 comedy The Wrong Guys, and the EPA driver in The Simpsons Movie. Born in Germany, working as an American actor, and retired from the profession since.
Movies (4)
TV (2)
Where to start with Karl Wiedergott
You cannot really watch a Karl Wiedergott performance on purpose, which is rather the point of the job, but The Simpsons between 1998 and 2010 is where all of it lives. Pick any episode from that stretch and count the one-line townspeople; a decent share of the men among them are him.
The Simpsons Movie is the tidiest single artefact, with a credited part as the EPA driver, and it is the only place his name attaches to something you can point at.
Outside the show there are three things worth naming: Pirates of Silicon Valley, a genuinely good television film about the early computer industry, Breakfast of Champions, an interesting failure of an adaptation, and The Wrong Guys, which is neither of those.