Brian Dennehy as Django and Peter Sohn as Emile in Ratatouille Courtesy of Pixar/Disney

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Barrel-chested character actor Brian Dennehy has one of the most recognizable faces in the industry, mostly due to the staggering number of films on his formidable resume. So it's not surprising that the actor has rarely hidden himself behind animated avatars, but in recent years (with films like Everyone's Hero, where he voiced an animated Babe Ruth, and now with Ratatouille), Dennehy has found a previously unexplored niche.

As Remy-the-rat's gruff father Django, Dennehy discovered that even his well-seasoned chops didn't fully prepare him to enter the world of Pixar.

Did having to do all this voice work change your technique at all?
The thing that you've got to know, which I know now and I wish I could go back and do it again, is that it's got to be big. The great figure of animated voices of course is Mel Blanc, and he was huge. Bugs Bunny or "Sufferin' Succotash!" — the bigger it was the better it was. As an actor, especially an actor with my size, you have a tendency to pull back and play under scene, and you can't do that with animation. It's got to be big. So [director] Brad [Bird] kept saying, "No, go for it. Push it." Which I did, and probably I would have done more if I had another whack at it.

Did they have the character in mind before they hired you, or did they build it around you and your performance?
No, they don't do that. I think what they do, you'll have to ask them, I think what they do is they say, "I hear so-and-so's voice in this character." And they asked me to come onboard and I heard about what it was, and I saw an early script, I just heard Jackie Gleason's voice. So that's what I did, Jackie Gleason in the old Honeymooners, that kind of semi-hysterical energy. And pretty much stuck with that all the way through.

Was this a case of you doing all your voice work in a week or so and then waiting for two years to see anything onscreen?
Oh god, it was four years. And we recorded lots of different times. I must have recorded ten times. Because there were a lot of changes. They changed a lot of the story, they changed a lot of the focus. So that by the end there was actually supposed to be two more sessions which they cancelled, because I think at that point they were pulling stuff out to make it tighter. And they had struck gold with [Peter] O'Toole and they made [his character] much more of a significant part, and it's a good thing they did, because it's brilliant stuff. O'Toole is amazing. And Ian [Holm] as well and Brad Garrett. And Brad Garrett's a guy who's done of a lot of this for years, so he's really good at it. And the movie's success speaks for itself.

Did that surprise you that the film caught on the way it did?
I was surprised when I read the reviews, which were astounding. I mean, the reviews were extraordinary. And I know about critics myself, and I thought, "This is the kiss of death. If these bastards like it this much, it must be a bad thing." Well, it didn't turn out to be a bad thing. It's a different thing. The 10-year-old kids probably weren't as enthusiastic about it as they were, say, about The Incredibles, but you had a better audience. You had a 14- or 15-year-old audience who liked it better, and then you had an audience of 20- and 30-year-olds who really liked it a lot, and you don't normally get them out of the house for a picture like this. So it was smart, they way they did this. It was campaigned the right way, and the reviews certainly didn't hurt. All of that stuff helps. In England, it actually gained in business from one week to the next. It did a certain amount of business then the next week it gained, like, 35 percent, and that never happens. So that means the world of mouth was sensational.

Were there specific ways your character changed through the various drafts of the movie?
I think there was less emphasis on the family, and then the family comes back into it at the end, when [Remy] gets himself into trouble. It was interesting how he solved the basic problem of the piece — the basic problem of the piece is that this guy's a rat and he wants to be a chef. How the hell do you solve that problem? Well, [Bird] went right at it. Brad went right at it and came up with this stuff with the hair and…and that was an interesting fix. I wasn't sure myself how he was going to fix that, and he did. Smart guy. Fearless. Fucking fearless. These things cost a lot of money. It takes guts to spend somebody else's hundred and fifty million bucks.

Are you working on Righteous Kill at the moment?
I finished.

What was it like switching gears from something like this to that?
I haven't worked on this for probably six months. You know, I'm an actor, that's what I do, but the two of them [Robert De Niro and Al Pacino], working with the two of them was terrific. We had a great time. It's going to be an interesting movie, the two of them actually play long scenes together, which they've actually never done. I'm looking forward to that myself. They seem to get along great, they seem to be great on the set. And they defer to each other, and they seem to be happy to be there. And God knows I was happy to be there. My job was to essentially be in charge of them, so I had to be… I couldn't be too worried about the way they felt about things. But they were both great about it. There was no problem. It was a nice experience. I don't know how great the script is, but it'll be fun to watch them.