Phil LaMarr has one live-action face people remember and dozens of voices they do not know are his. He builds characters out of accent and restraint, a fussy Jamaican bureaucrat and a near-silent samurai, and the best of them have run for a quarter of a century.
Fi1m perspective
Hermes Conrad is a bureaucrat, and he is a Jamaican bureaucrat, and Phil LaMarr plays the join between those two facts as though nobody had ever found it odd. The lilt says the man should be relaxed. The delivery says he has a form for that and you have filled it in wrong. It is a small joke, and LaMarr has kept it fresh across a series that began in 1999 and has been revived more than once.
Most people who know the voice do not know the face. The face turned up in one live-action part that people remember, Marvin in Pulp Fiction (1994), and then in five seasons of Mad TV (1995 to 2000), where LaMarr was in the original cast and wrote as well as performed. Almost everything after that is voice work: Futurama (1999), the title role in Samurai Jack (2001), John Stewart in Justice League (2001), and a long run of animation and games since. The only reservation anyone raises about him is that the voice work crowded out the live-action career, and it is hard to argue with that.
What he does that other voice actors do not is restraint in two directions at once. Hermes is all talk, and the trick is that the accent never carries the character on its own; the fussiness does. Jack, for Genndy Tartakovsky, is almost no talk at all. LaMarr plays a samurai who says little for whole stretches and has to be read from a grunt and the way he holds a silence, and it is the harder job of the two, because there is nothing to hide behind. He has told interviewers that the voice is the secondary part of the job and the acting comes first, and on the evidence that is not modesty, it is method. Going back through the early Futurama seasons, we found we were waiting for Hermes, and were slightly surprised by it, because he is not the funniest character in the cast; he is the one whose lines land at the same clip every time, and that steadiness is what makes the office feel like a workplace.
Most recently he has a small part as Howard in Minions & Monsters (2026), a film we liked more than we expected to and which does not lean on him. That is the shape of the career now: the reliable voice in a large cast, called back whenever a series returns. It is not a complaint. A performer who can do the talkative civil servant and the silent swordsman with the same instrument has already shown what he has; the open question is whether anyone will give him a live-action part large enough to show his face doing it.
Biography
Phil LaMarr is an American actor and voice actor. Born in Los Angeles, he attended Harvard-Westlake School and Yale University before training with The Groundlings. He was one of the original cast members on the sketch comedy series Mad TV (1995–2000).
LaMarr is known for his film role as Marvin in Pulp Fiction (1994) and for extensive voice work. His credits include Hermes Conrad in Futurama (1999–), the title character in Samurai Jack (2001–2017), John Stewart / Green Lantern in the DC Animated Universe, and additional voices in Incredibles 2 (2018) and The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023). He voiced Howard in Minions & Monsters (2026).
