Gromit Gets a Voice After 37 Years of Silence. Martin Freeman Reads His Autobiography, and Nick Park Says It Isn’t a ‘Voice’

Gromit has not said a word since 1989. On 22 October he gets six hours of them. Penguin confirmed on Friday that Martin Freeman has recorded the audiobook of Grand: The Autobiography of Gromit, as told to Nick Park, and Park is already managing expectations: Freeman is “not doing a Gromit ‘voice’ as such.” Fans are split anyway. Here is what was announced, what the creator says it is, and why the casting is a small lesson in what narration is for.

What Penguin announced

The news went out on Friday 9 October through the Press Association and Variety, then everywhere else by lunchtime. Freeman recorded the book earlier this month at Penguin Studios in London. The audiobook and ebook arrive on 22 October from Penguin Audio and Ebury, in partnership with Aardman, and Penguin’s own page lists the hardback for the same day at 272 pages. In the United States, Penguin Press has the hardcover, ebook and a six-hour audiobook on 27 October.

Nick Park, the four-time Oscar winner who created Wallace and Gromit, framed the problem in his statement. “When you create a character who has no voice, and whose facial expressions are everything, what do you do when your publisher reminds you there’ll be an audiobook?” he said. “Who could possibly be the voice of a character everyone feels they know, but nobody’s actually heard?”

His answer: “The more I thought about it, the more I realised Martin Freeman was the obvious choice really.”

Then the line that matters for anyone who records for a living. “Martin is not doing a Gromit ‘voice’ as such, he’s reading Gromit’s story as Gromit put it; his inner thoughts, his candid insights and endless witticisms, bringing to them his usual colour, thoughtfulness and wry humour.”

Thirty-seven years without a word

Gromit first appeared in A Grand Day Out in 1989, and he was very nearly a talking dog. Park originally intended the character to be voiced by the actor Peter Hawkins, and dropped the idea once he realised how much Gromit could say with small movements of the brow. That decision made him the straight man of the series, a clay Buster Keaton in the eyes of critics, who reacts to Wallace’s inventions with a look and a sigh.

Since then he has carried four short films, two features and two series without a line of dialogue, while Wallace has always had a voice. Peter Sallis played him from 1989 until his last work on the character in 2010, and Ben Whitehead, who had stood in on games and adverts from 2008, became the voice from the 2012 BBC Proms show onward, through to Vengeance Most Fowl in 2024.

So the dog’s silence is not a gimmick. It is the character. That is why Friday’s announcement caused a row that a normal narrator casting never would.

“A criminal offence,” and “surprisingly better than it has any right to”

LADbible rounded up the first reactions on Friday evening. Some fans called giving Gromit a voice a “criminal offence” and said the filmmakers had “broke a sacred code.” Others, after hearing the teaser, said “it does feel like it matches him” and that they had “always imagined it like this.” One summed up the mood of the second camp: it works “surprisingly better than it has any right to.”

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The teaser itself does the persuading. Over a wall of framed portraits from the films, the on-screen text echoes the book’s opening line, “Yes, I’m a dog,” and Freeman’s reading closes with Gromit’s own reason for speaking at last: “I do know where all the bones are buried. So, I guess it’s time I spoke.” DiscussingFilm’s post of the clip, headlined simply “Gromit’s voice has been revealed,” was the version most people saw.

Penguin’s page carries the full opening, and it sets the tone Park is describing. “Yes. I’m a dog. And you’re reading a book written by a dog. I’ll just let you take that in for a minute. Maybe have a cup of tea and a biscuit. You’ll get used to it. Most humans are quite adaptable.” The book was supposed to be Wallace’s job, the dog explains, but Wallace is still building the machine he planned to write it with, a typewriter fitted with wheels and a flame-thrower, in breach of a household agreement about flame-throwers.

Penguin's page for Grand, screenshot taken 11 October 2026. Image: Penguin Books UK

Why “not a voice” is the whole point

Park’s distinction sounds like hair-splitting until you think about the job. An audiobook of a first-person memoir is not a cartoon. Nobody is asking Freeman to bark, or to invent a Lancashire growl that will be stuck to the character for the next 37 years. He is reading prose written in Gromit’s head, and the brief is the one every narrator knows: carry the author’s attitude, not an impression of the author.

Martin Freeman on an Aardman set in the studio documentary A Grand Night In. Image: Aardman

That is also why the casting lands. Freeman’s whole screen career is reaction. Tim in The Office, John Watson, Bilbo: men who watch someone louder do something unwise and let their face do the commentary. Park is hiring the look, not the larynx. The sensible fan take, that it “does feel like it matches him,” is really a note on that: the reading sits inside the character because the actor’s register already does.

For working narrators there is a quieter lesson. Celebrity casting on a flagship audiobook is nothing new, and this one was always going to go to a name. But the rationale Park gave is the rationale that gets anyone the job: he could describe exactly what the voice should not do. If you can say that about a character, you can audition for it.

A busy month for a quiet dog

The book was first announced by Aardman and Ebury on 17 June, when Park said Gromit “has decided to break silence, put pen to paper, paw to keyboard and share with the world some of his innermost thoughts and feelings.” The pre-publication push starts on 14 October, with Park on a London stage for an evening of stories a week before anyone can buy the book, and the studio’s 50th anniversary show opening across town the same day.

Nick Park in The Making of A Grand Day Out on the official Wallace and Gromit channel. Image: Aardman

Then the dog speaks. The hardback is £22 in the UK and $30 in the US. Freeman’s six hours are the first anyone has heard of what Gromit sounds like inside, and if the teaser is a guide, he sounds like a man who has put up with a great deal and would like a biscuit.

Sources: Press Association via The Irish News; Variety; The Guardian; LADbible; LBC; Bleeding Cool; Fiction Horizon; Aardman; Penguin Books UK; Penguin Random House US; Wikipedia. Images: Aardman; Penguin Books UK.

Lee este artículo en español: Gromit tiene voz tras 37 años de silencio. Martin Freeman lee su autobiografía, y Nick Park dice que no es una 'voz'

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