Samuel E. Wright
Samuel E. Wright is an actor, born 1946.
Broadway was the day job. Wright originated Mufasa in The Lion King on stage, work that leaves no film credit at all, and the screen record here opens quietly in 1980 with Turk Adams on Enos. He died in 2021.
The reason anyone knows the voice is Sebastian. He sang the lead vocal on Under the Sea, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and the character he built around it is stranger than its reputation suggests: a crab whose permanent condition is anxiety, delivering calypso at full volume while worrying about his job. The panic is the joke and the singing is the release, and Wright plays both without ever softening the accent into cuteness. The role then refused to end. This page tracks it through the 1992 animated series, Raw Toonage, Marsupilami, Disney's House of Mouse, the direct-to-video sequel Return to the Sea and a sing-along release in 2006. That is one character across nearly twenty years.
The dramatic work is thinner but not slight. He played Dizzy Gillespie in Bird, Clint Eastwood's film about Charlie Parker, which asks an actor to be a musician in a room full of musicians, and Alfred in Alex Haley's Queen. Dinosaur cast him as Kron and used the same asset the Disney films did: a voice with real bottom to it that can turn threatening without being loud.
Movies (5)
TV (7)
Where to start with Samuel E. Wright
Begin with The Little Mermaid, and listen to it rather than watching it: the performance is a singer doing character work at speed, and it carries the film's best two numbers. Bird is the serious counterweight and the reason to take him seriously as an actor, a straight dramatic turn as Dizzy Gillespie in a film with no interest in charm. Dinosaur is worth an hour for the voice alone, cast against type as something heavy and hostile. After that the returns fall off: The Little Mermaid is a Saturday-morning expansion of the film, The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea exists for children who wanted more, and Disney's House of Mouse is a cameo machine. Alex Haley's Queen is the one people miss. The Broadway work, which was arguably his best, is not something a filmography can show you.