For 24 seasons and counting, Seth MacFarlane has voiced Brian, the Griffins’ family dog and Stewie’s best pal on Fox’s “Family Guy.” However, once upon a time, long before, the iconic “Family Guy” theme song burrowed into our brains, “Shameless” star William H. Macy gave the character a try. The incredibly short switcheroo happened when Seth MacFarlane was working on the pilot.
In an interview with IGN, MacFarlane revealed that Macy took the hound with an erratic writing career for a walk on his own, even after MacFarlane had done an initial recording of Brian. “We did audition Brian, just for the hell of it. I can’t remember why, but we did audition that character, and we were looking. There were actually some cool people -– at one point, William H. Macy auditioned for Brian,” MacFarlane shared. However, while Macy’s efforts with the character were satisfactory, the studio ultimately sent Brian back to the original voice that is now synonymous with the Griffins’ furriest family member.
Seth MacFarlane was just too good as Brian for Family Guy
After recording William H. Macy and a batch of other actors, Seth MacFarlane took the various versions of Brian into the room with studio executives to find the right choice for Peter and Stewie’s best friend. It was a tried-and-tested method for selecting the voice that best suited the job. “The way you do animation auditions is you just bring in five tapes and play them for the network executives, and you narrow it down to like the five that you like,” MacFarlane told IGN.
What followed was a blind test, with the end result actually being the original voice, after MacFarlane was mixed in among the deck. “You don’t tell them who they are, and they just listen to the voices, and they sort of go off of that,” MacFarlane shared. “We put my original Brian in there with the batch, and that was the one that they chose.”
In MacFarlane’s eyes, he doesn’t put his contribution down to being the best of the bunch, but the one that had been stuck with the character of Brian the longest. “It was the fact that they had heard Brian that way in the initial pilot, and at that point they were used to hearing him that way. I think they just didn’t want to mess with it,” he said. Well, if the voice of a cartoon dog isn’t broken, best not to try and fix it.