Quotes

Everybody's going to approach a character differently, depending upon what they bring to it on their own intellectual level or their feelings from their heart and soul.

I enjoy dramatic narration, of course, because I'm an actor and I started as an actor. But I love things that are a challenge, and I look forward to more work with that in the future. So there's always a sun coming up the following day for me.

My brother was a captain in the Marine Corps and a very big hero in my life.

I immerse myself right into my character whether or not I'm relating to people live as an actor on stage or whatever.

I'm always involved with the Aerospace Program and NASA and Goddard Space Flight Center. And if kids feel so inclined, they can log onto NASA and the Optimus Prime Spinoff Award, which we present every year to some of the brilliant young minds that are taking up into the academics of space, science, technology, math.

As a young actor, I would be invited to the CBC radio drama department to do voices for different characters, and I found that I could do quite a few of them. I wasn't a visual presence, and I found it easier to construct a voice from the written page.

The phenomenon of Transformers (1984) itself is mind-shaking, you know?

I kind of modeled Optimus Prime's voice out of many people I had known over the years, my family especially.

I always try to make a voice to go with the characteristics - if the guy's a hothead or he's cool, whatever.

My mom used to say, "Peter, don't do this, you're going to ruin your voice! It's going to stay like that!" But when I was an acting student, I studied under an operatic coach named Bernard Diamant from New York. He described the basic instrument, as we all have, the human voice. I was particularly impressed with a remark that he made: A baby, when it's born, has the most perfect vocal ability. Opera singers study to get back to that for years through the use of your diaphragm, the expansion of air in your chest and lungs, the use of tonal cavities that are built into your upper chest and your head.

On Optimus Prime: For Optimus, they follow the guidelines of character traits. There's still the honesty, integrity, honor, dignity, the sense of trustworthiness and compassion. Those qualities have not changed, and that makes it relatively easy for Optimus to maintain a consistent level of character.

On The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour (1971): I was brought into the studio and they showed me an animated ball that was being poked with a stick from the inside, and the ball would open up. They said, "Try to think of a voice, or something. He's kind of like a little gremlin inside the ball ... Then, as an announcer, I want you to say, 'From Television City in Hollywood, ladies and gentlemen, it's the Sonny & Cher Show!', okay?" So I do Take One. They kept that recording for the next four years. I never had to do it again.