Wendell and Wild stars Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele as two brothers who are demons and are trying to escape the abyss.
The scary stop-motion movie came out in theatres on October 21 and will be on Netflix on October 28. It is a mix of ideas and sources from The Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick and Coraline director Jordan Peele.
Just in time for Halloween, the two of them made a PG-13 dark comedy with stomping afro-punk music, a plot about the prison system, diverse characters, and a great ensemble playing hilariously creative roles.
Use this page as a guide if you want to go on your own “green shadow quest” to find out more about the actors and characters in this stunning and unsettling film. Just make sure you don’t let any of your own demons out on the way.
The Demon brothers, Wendell and Wild, are locked up in the underworld and made to live with Buffalo Belzer, the terrible and evil lord of the underworld. With the help of a girl named Kat, Wendell and Wild plan their escape and try to get into the human world while eating psychedelic hair gel. The brothers go from bothering Kat in her dreams to terrorising her hometown so they can turn it into a theme park for the dead.
They aren’t very dangerous, but they are a lot of trouble and a lot of fun. They made a deal with the orphan. These two are at best difficult. They might do a few good things while making their lives better by doing stupid and bad things.
The best thing about the movie might be how Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele play off of each other. Since the end of their show on TV in 2015, Key and Peele have gone on to have successful careers on their own, and they sometimes work on projects together. In The Bubble, a comedy from 2022, Keegan-Michael Key played an actor who was excited to film even though he was quarantined because of a virus from Covid-19.
In the comedy show Reboot, the actor who plays Keanu played Reed Sterling, a member of the cast of a show about a dysfunctional family. In the past few years, Jordan Peele has built a big career as a director while also doing voice work. Peele is best known for his mind-bending horror movies like Get Out and Us. His latest movie, Nope, is a sci-fi horror mystery set in the world of aliens.
For Jordan Peele fans, the idea that the master of horror and the master of stop-motion will work together is a dream come true. Henry Selick talked about working with Jordan Peele in an interview with Steve Weintraub of Collider. He said, “So many of his ideas were new and better, and I took them.” See the whole interview further down.
Kat is a young Gothic orphan who has been hurt and has a strange supernatural ability: she can see and talk to her own personal demons. Kat, who is smart and curious, just moved from juvenile detention to the run-down and creepy Catholic school where most of the book takes place.
With the help of one of the school’s nuns, Kat learns that she has to accept what happened to her parents and the flaws that connect her to her demons. As a Hellmaiden, Kat goes on a journey of self-discovery and fights to protect her house from the demons she herself summons. She does this while wearing a huge sweatshirt and holding a stereo.
Lyric Ross is well-known for his role as Déjà Pearson in the popular drama This Is Us. Ross is currently filming for the upcoming Marvel TV show Ironheart.
Through a “green-lit” shadow journey, Sister Helly helps Kat face her demons. Sister Helly is the fiercest enemy of brothers Wendell and Wild, but she is also kind. She might have to work with the two clever demons to stop something even worse from taking over.
Marvel fans will remember Angela Bassett as Queen Ramonda from the Black Panther movie. She was beautiful and strong. She is best known for her roles in the 1990s movies Strange Days and Contact, as well as her role in American Horror Story as a seductive modern Marie Laveau.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the sequel to Black Panther, is about to come out, and fans can’t wait to see the queen again. In the meantime, viewers will be able to hear Bassett as the voice of Sister Helly, who fights demons.
This is not the first time the actress from Olympus Has Fallen has done voice work. She has also brought to life characters in animated shows like The Simpsons, BoJack Horseman, and the Transformers movie Bumblebee.
Kat goes to a boring boarding school run by the priest, Father Bests, who doesn’t stand out. He is willing to do anything to protect his school, but when he gets a call from a bad businessman who wants to turn the area into a jail so he can profit from mass incarceration, he is hit over the head with a reality he never saw coming.
James Hong has one of the most well-known voices in movies and TV. Hong is best known for his live-action role as David Lo Pan in the 1986 movie Big Trouble in Little China. However, he has also played many roles in animated movies, including Mr. Ping, Po’s goose father in the movie Kung Fu Panda. Earlier this year, he played Grandpa in the TV series Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai. He now has three projects in post-production, including Patsy Lee and The Keepers of the Five Kingdoms. In the upcoming action movie, Hong will play a shop owner who takes his granddaughter to a mythical place.
Raul, a young trans guy and fellow outsider, can’t see the demons that are destroying the town. He becomes friends with Kat, a new kid with spiky emo hair and gauged ears who is also a goth. They both know what it’s like to feel lonely and different.
Raul is not only kind and helpful, but he is also a great artist and a great friend. Sam Zelaya, an upcoming actor, plays Raul. Before this, Zelaya was in the short movie Poppets, which was like a soap opera. This will be the first time the voice actor does voice work.
Siobhan, Sloane, and Sweetie are the perfect examples of mean girls with cute pets. Kat doesn’t like the way the popular kids and their games make her feel. Siobhan is played by Tamara Smart. This is not her first horror role, but it is her first time doing voice acting.
She became well-known for playing Kelly Ferguson in A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting and Young Jade Wesker in the Netflix series Resident Evil. Seema Virdi’s first role as an actress was as Sloane. She is one of the people who made the storyboards for Wendell and Wild. She has also made storyboards for video games, TV shows, and movies in the past. Romana Young, who voices Sweetie, is well-known for her roles as Eleanor Wong in Never Have I Ever and Mona Wu in DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.
A much bigger, badder, and worse demon makes its way to the surface of the human world in search of his missing prisoners. Before they got away, the demon twins with the same name were under the control of an underworld lord named Buffalo Belzer. Wendell and Wild planned to tear down Buffalo Belzer’s park for the dead while they spent their days taking care of Buffalo Belzer’s hair. After he finds the brothers at their own macabre theme park, he runs through the churchyard to scare and destroy the area.
Ving Rhames has done some voice acting, but he is best known for his on-screen roles, like Luther Stickell in the Mission: Impossible movies and Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino. In the next Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning movies, which are set to come out in 2023 and 2024, he will play Stickell again.
Along with these actors and characters, Maxine Peake, Gary Gatewood, Tantoo Cardinal, Igal Naor, and Natalie Martinez from Death Race, Dances with Wolves, Grimm, A Black Lady Sketch Show, and Homeland also lend their voices to Wendell and Wild (The Theory of Everything).
