Peter Cullen Put More Heart Into Optimus Prime Than You Knew

8 min readPeter Cullen is one of the few actors I’ve ever met whose true personality closely matched his most famous character. This is especially unusual since that character was a towering red and blue robot that could make a clockwork conversion into a big-rig truck.For decades beginning in the early ‘80s, Cullen was the voice of Optimus Prime, the heroic leader of the Autobots in the Transformers animated series, which aired five days a week on afternoons after school. The actor, who has died at the age of 85, taught kids to do much more than to deepen our squeaky voices to convey authority. He himself transformed what might have been a cynical animated toy commercial into a model of decency and fortitude.It was just another voice-acting gig, but Cullen was determined to add a little bit of humanity to it all. He was stunned years later to discover how much it mattered to people. “This was the most astounding thing to me,” he told me. “I mean, to look at my career and all those years and to think that a cartoon character would have such an effect on so many people's lives? It's humbling. I can't think of any other way to put it. It's a responsibility too. There was a time in New York when a young man said, ‘I didn't have a father, and I used to come home from school and you were my father.’”Pop culture figures have a way of filling those voids. In three days this week, the world lost Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, and now Peter Cullen. For Gen X, it’s like our mother, father, and wild uncle were all taken away at once. Cullen may be the most mysterious to people because he was rarely in the spotlight himself. He had a medium build, a dark mustache, and a soft-spoken demeanor in real life, but he could take one deep breath and summon the sound of phenomenal cosmic power.Cullen had performed much more than Optimus Prime over the years. He was the voice of Winnie the Pooh’s melancholy pal Eeyore, the narrator on Rainbow Brite, and the growling voice of 1976’s King Kong and the clicking, snarling hunter in 1987’s Predator, among scores of others. Quite a range. But the Autobot leader unexpectedly became the role of a lifetime.“I just approached it like anything else. I'm like a foot soldier. I'm a grunt and I do volume and I worked hard for many, many years,” Cullen said. “The fact that Prime was such a success was a very big surprise to me years later.”Cullen’s deep and calm voice as the character was so resonant and iconic that Michael Bay couldn’t help but recruit him back to the ‘bot for his string of bombastic live-action blockbusters. That’s when I finally crossed paths with Cullen, in the summer of 2007, just before Transformers hit the big screen.At that time, I was a reporter for USA Today, and I wanted to talk to Cullen because, like many boys from my generation, I simply adored that cartoon, and I’d reached that point in adulthood when nostalgia begins to kick in. As a kid, it was Cullen’s voice I heard in my head when I played with the Hasbro toys, and it was Cullen I imitated when my brother and my friends would run around the backyard pretending to be the shapeshifting alien robots.We were playfighting. But Optimus Prime actually emerged from a real young man who had gone to war—and returned very different.Shout! StudiosPeter Cullen voiced his most famous role, Optimus Prime, for over 40 years.The Vietnam Veteran Who Inspired PrimeThe catchphrase of the Transformers was “More Than Meets The Eye,” but there was also more to Cullen’s performance than met the ear. Cullen told me he ruminated on who this Optimus Prime character was supposed to be, and wanted him to be an actual force for good in the lives of the show’s young viewers, if at all possible. He began to model the voice on the kind of figures who inspired him when he was a boy.“It came from family members that I drew from, and my brother in particular,” he said. “We're thirteen months apart and he was an officer in the Marine Corps fighting in Vietnam. He had been there longer than anybody should be in battle.”His brother survived the war, and when he came back stateside, the two Cullen boys became roommates again. “I saw a huge change in him and he was a wonderful man,” Cullen recalled. “He didn't talk much about his experiences, but the power inside of him as a person was undeniable. A strength that I had never seen him have when we were growing up. He had changed. And he was my hero.”Many hear John Wayne in Optimus Prime, but what they’re actually hearing is Larry Cullen. “John Wayne …? Not necessarily,” Cullen said when I brought up this comparison. “We have a similar voice and timber. He sounds more like my brother Larry. And my brother Larry looks more like him.”Credit goes to the writers for these storylines, of course, but it was Cullen who gave them life, and I have no doubt that Optimus Prime became more of an honorable and inspirational figure thanks to his memorable vocal performances. The actor’s influence can most easily be seen in moments when Prime might be frustrated—when a plan falls apart, when Bumblebee or some of the smaller, less experienced Autobots mess up, or when the heroic leader tries to reason with his enemies rather than fight.Another actor might have made Prime’s reactions harder and more intimidating, in an attempt to show his power. But Cullen’s Optimus Prime was not just strong, he was kind. He was patient. He might become outraged or angry but never lost his cool. Cullen picked up that trait from his brother, and he gave it to the Autobot leader.“He could harness a very severe situation and bring control to it, and he was always unflustered. So years later when I had the opportunity to audition for Optimus Prime, I just drew on my brother's persona,” Cullen says.The actor also got to know his brother’s war buddies, who only deepened that sense of earned wisdom. “Every one of those Marines, there's a sense about them that’s chillingly real,” Cullen told me. “They have seen something that very few people can't, they've seen inside themselves. And that's what I try to convey with Prime when I do it. I want a sense of honor and that feeling of knowing who you are so that when you translate that into a conversation or relationship with another actor, that they can sense it, they can feel it.”The kids viewing at home could feel it too. Prime was obviously an advanced technological being, but he believed himself superior to none and insisted that all forms of life had value. Megatron and his Decepticons might have seen human beings as fleas who could easily be smeared off the planet so they could ransack its resources, but Prime believed that the powerful had an obligation to protect those who needed it.Albert L. Ortega//Getty ImagesAnthony Breznican and Peter Cullen at San Diego Comic-Con’s Bumblebee panel in 2018.“Did I Really Do a Bad Job?”The thing that surprised me most when I met Cullen, in a now-defunct restaurant called Le Petit Chateau in the San Fernando Valley that summer, was that he had no idea how much he meant to people.The restaurant looked like a little fairy-tale castle, and it was where he liked to hang out and get lunch when he was recording cartoons back in the ‘80s. He was nervous about our interview because he didn’t talk to reporters very much. So, he downed a mojito before we even started. “Well, that loosens me up,” he said. “Okay, Sergeant, I'll tell you anything now.”We started out by discussing when the first animated Transformers movie hit theaters in 1986 and twenty-five minutes in, the main character—our beloved Optimus Prime—was killed off. I asked, “What was your feeling when you heard that they were going to make a live-action movie?”“Well, I was excited like everybody, but then I was also apprehensive having been a victim of the 1986 movie where I was killed,” he said.After several years of the Transformers TV show, Hasbro leadership felt they should clear the decks to make way for new characters—and new toys to sell—but to say this was upsetting and disappointing to the fans would be an understatement. (Coincidentally, the film is even being reissued in a few weeks for its fortieth anniversary under the banner of “The Apology Tour,” a joking reference to the heartbreak it provoked.)It turns out that this move hurt Cullen even more than the legions of young fans. “Their decision to get rid of me was just as much of a mystery because I had to think to myself, ‘Was it because I sucked at it? Is my character shitty? I mean, did I really do a bad job? I'm not performing up to the level of what they want. I'm so bad that nobody's buying a toy or something…’ We didn't know.”He had reason not to know. He later heard rumors that fan mail was discarded rather than delivered to the actors. “It could have come. Maybe it didn't come. We'll never know, and that's a great mystery and I'll leave it like that,” he said.Still, the movie’s removal of Optimus Prime still stung. Ironically, you could hear it in Cullen’s voice, even all those years later. “I was pretty surprised that I was let go. I mean, executed or whatever. Murdered. Whacked by my brother, Megatron. And not knowing, not receiving any fan mail or anything else…”Cullen just assumed that his work didn’t matter as much as he’d hoped. That was corrected when the live-action movie was in development, and longtime fans of the series began to harness the power of the Internet to make it clear: There was no Optimus Prime except Peter Cullen.“All these many years later to find out that I'm being resurrected on the Internet with all the blogs and all the websites …,” Cullen told me. “There was a genuine interest in what I had done. And so I started feeling perhaps, ‘God, these guys want me to do it. That'd be great. I hope they're not disappointed.’ Then I started really wanting it for myself as well. I'm used to not wanting things too much because there's so much disappointment attached to not getting things.”The beautiful thing is, all those kids who grew up loving his Optimus Prime actually had his back decades later. They used their own voices to speak up for him—and it worked. Cullen’s participation in the live-action franchise did not just let a working actor know how much he meant to the fandom, but it gave him two more decades of high-profile work as the Transformers continued to rule the box office.“It was that tenacity, that stubbornness that allows me to be here talking about it,” Cullen told me in 2007. “Without them, and God love them, I love them all for it. Without that, I probably would have been passed over for a major Hollywood star.”Instead, even more generations got to forge their own connection with Cullen’s Optimus Prime, whose core power was truly the man within.