Longtime Minions Voice Actor Reveals He Almost Quit the Job: ‘It’s Exhausting’

Pierre Coffin, the director behind the Despicable Me franchise who lends his voice to the now-immensely popular Minions characters, said he almost quit the franchise out of sheer exhaustion.

“It’s an enormous amount of work. Each film takes three years, sometimes four when things don’t go as planned. It’s exhausting,” Coffin, 59, explained in an interview with Variety published on Saturday, June 20.

“And on top of directing, I also do the Minions’ voices,” he added. “If the script changes, I have to redo all the voices. I’m the only one doing that. So after Despicable Me 3, I told [Illumination founder Chris Meledandri] I wanted to stop.”

Coffin confessed that he wanted to focus on other projects like the Olympics, short films and his marketing career.

He also explained exactly what makes voicing the Minions so difficult and tiring. While it may sound like the Minions speak gibberish, their dialogue is meticulously scripted because audiences need to be able to understand what the characters are saying through tone, inflection and animation.

“The magic is that you understand them without really understanding them,” he told the outlet, noting that he sometimes peppers in words in English or other languages.

Despite the hard work, he was lured back for the seventh film in the franchise, Minions & Monsters — but whether he remains the definitive voice of the little yellow creatures remains to be seen.

“I really don’t know. I’m waiting to see what this one brings me,” Coffin said of Minions & Monsters. “I have a strange relationship with these films. Every time one came out, I thought, ‘You can tell only 20 people worked on it, that it was pulled in every direction.’ And every time, I was surprised by the box office.”