Matthew Yang King

Most of Matt Yang King's working life reaches an audience with his face left out of it. The on-camera credits exist and go back a long way, small parts in Strong Medicine, Numb3rs, a Korean soldier in the 2012 Red Dawn, but the volume is in the booth: television voiceover, commercials, and a long run of video games including the World of Warcraft franchise, Cyberpunk 2077 and Fortnite.

The Netflix Avatar: The Last Airbender handed him the hardest brief in that line of work. Appa and Momo have no dialogue at all, so every bit of affection, complaint and comic timing has to arrive as noise, and the show does not function if the audience refuses to believe the bison. He solves adjacent problems elsewhere in other registers. Hosting Love, Death & Robots means being a steady frame around an anthology that changes tone every episode. Playing Kung Lao in an animated Mortal Kombat film means taking the source seriously instead of winking at it. On Pixar's Elemental he is credited with three separate parts in one movie, which is the animation industry's ordinary compliment to an actor who can supply a crowd by himself.

Recent years have widened the range rather than deepened it: Blue Eye Samurai, Creature Commandos, Marvel Zombies, an animated Witcher film, additional voices on Lightyear and In Your Dreams. He has also made his own work, creating the short films The World of Steam and The Duelist.