Despite having voiced almost every single Minion since the yellow creatures’ grand cinematic entrance in 2010’s “Despicable Me,” Pierre Coffin admits that — much to the disappointment of many people he meets — their high-pitched gibberish is not something he’s able to perform on cue.
“If you asked me to do the Minions voice right now, I just couldn’t do it,” he tells Variety with the resigned sigh of someone who is requested to say “Bello!” and “Banana!” rather a lot.
There’s a very simple reason for this. The Minions voices are indeed Coffin’s own, but pitched up by six semitones. And it’s something he has to record in slow motion.
It all stems from “Despicable Me,” which he directed (as he did “Despicable Me 2,” “Despicable Me 3” and the first “Minions” spin-off movie, before taking a directing break for “Minions: The Rise of Gru” and “Despicable Me 4” and returning for “Minions and Monsters,” released by Universal today).
So Coffin’s story goes, he was never originally down to voice the diminutive three-fingered supervillain henchmen. However, when they were in development on the first film he was struck by a line in Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio’s script in which it said “Gru arrives on stage and the Minions clamour his name.”
