Shadowing Practice: Seth MacFarlane Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ - Learn English Speaking with Video

There's a pomposity to film sets.

Yeah, get them into the works.

Like, what does that mean?

Oh, hair and makeup.

Yeah, they're traveling.

Copy that.

No, you're not in the military.

You're not in the army. That 10-1.

10-1 is going to the bathroom.

Say I'm going to the bathroom.

I got to go to the bathroom.

It's no shame in that.

We all do it.

Hi, I'm Seth MacFarlane, and these are my iconic characters.

Family Guy.

Life of Larry was a student film that I had done at the Rhode Island School of Design, and I had conceived that to be a pilot that would get me to Hollywood.

Hanna-Barbera saw that film and gave me a job.

Worked on a show called Johnny Bravo.

Worked on a show called Dexter's Lab, Cow and Chicken.

Did a pitch for a prime time animated series called Family Guy.

Developed it while I was at Hanna-Barbera slash Cartoon Network.

Came to the attention of Fox.

Pitched the show.

They gave me like a $40,000 budget to do the pilot, which meant I pretty much had to do it by hand.

So I spent six months doing that.

And that eventually became Family Guy.

Oh, you got some pie, eh?

Can I have a piece?

Uh, sure.

Oh, let me have some of that cool whip.

What'd you say?

You can't have a pie without cool whip.

Cool whip?

Cool whip, yeah.

You mean cool whip?

Yeah, cool whip.

Who are the Griffins?

Well, I'm not sure who they are now, but when I was there, the family was always designed to be a very region-specific...

I had just graduated from college in Providence, and so I was very familiar with that region.

It was in many ways like a mini Boston.

The dialect was more or less the same.

It's a ridiculous part of the country in a lot of ways.

The dialect is, and you know, I have members of my family who have it, but it's hilarious when employed in the interest of comedy.

These characters were, they all came from different places.

I mean, Peter and Brian were very much vaudevillian opposites of each other.

Peter, you might be underestimating the difficulty of writing a comic strip.

As someone who occasionally dates the creative muse, I can vouch for the unforgiving face of a blank sheet of paper.

In fact, I think it was William Faulkner who said, I'm back.

I'm published.

Check it out.

Lois began very much as an avatar for my aunt.

She became something very different, mostly thanks to Alex Borstein.

You know, Meg and Chris are the quintessential animated kids.

Stewie was Rex Harrison, the character actor from the 1960s and 50s and 60s.

It was Henry Higgins.

There, there, there.

Who's hurting you, you silly girl?

What you take me for?

I thought this was going to be a lawn party.

I don't have one pair of long pants.

Generally for me the voices came first.

Peter was a mixture of a lot of different, you know, voices.

There was a security guard that worked at the Rhode Island School of Design who had this really, really thick, really expressive Rhode Island accent.

Boy, you guys are not sucking me into the story at all.

I'm just telling you for your own benefit, I'm very aware that I'm watching a play right now.

Quagmire started off as a throwback to this, you know, this guy whose house looked like something out of a Peter Sellers movie.

That voice kind of came from me listening to old radio dramas from the 50s.

There was a bookstore in my hometown when I was a kid, and you could go in and they sold audio tapes.

Things like The Lone Ranger, Suspense, or The Shadow.

The commercials were just so absurd and just, you know, everybody talk like this.

It was just, you know, that sort of mid-Atlantic, I guess, existed right in the pocket that the microphones of that time could handle.

The low end wasn't there yet, and so it was all about mid-range.

Oh.

Hey.

Uh, didn't think I'd see anyone I knew here.

There's no Daniel Day-Lewis process that goes on here with these kids.

It's not that deep.

There are certain facial contortions that, you know, you do Steele and this happens, I do Peter and this happens.

It's a little bit of that.

I've been doing all those characters for so long that it really is just a, it's like turning one light off and another one on.

Where did the inspiration to do animation come from?

I mean, all those things were influences.

All in the Family was an influence.

The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, obviously.

What Disney was doing at the time was a huge influence.

When I was in college, Disney was kind of having its second golden age with Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin and those movies.

and everyone in our film department, in the animation division, kind of saw that as the ultimate goal.

To work for Disney would be, you know, and now technically I do.

So that was kind of what I was really striving for.

I was doing stand-up at the same time.

The Simpsons started to take off, and that altered my trajectory because I was really loving doing stand-up,

but obviously it wasn't the kind of comedy I'd be doing if I worked for Disney.

I started to kind of rethink things, and thought, they've kind of rewritten the rule book.

Suddenly I'm watching a cartoon that actually is making me laugh.

It's for me, as an adult.

This changes the game.

The kind of humor that makes me laugh, and the stuff that I was doing in my stand-up routines, could now maybe meld with animation.

And so that show was instrumental in altering my trajectory.

100

And I'm sure the trajectories of a lot of other people who are in the business.

101

I mean, you know, from King of the Hill to Bob's Burgers to South Park, you know, all those shows owe their existence,

102

I think, and in many ways their stylistic paradigm to The Simpsons.

103

The thing I liked about animation was

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that it gave me the chance to explore a lot of different art forms

105

that interested me and had interested me throughout the course of my life all in one package.

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Animation is, I don't know that any other medium can really say that.

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It's visual art, it's performance art, the voiceover, it's writing, and it's music.

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All of those things exist in this one package.

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There's always a different art form to play with in that medium.

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That's what excited me the most.

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Time to terrorize the terrorists.

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Ugh, you prepared catchphrases for yourself?

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No, not necessarily.

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To me, the catchphrases are the least interesting things.

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They kind of find you as opposed to the reverse.

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There was a guy I worked with at Hanna-Barbera.

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He was a very business-minded writer.

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And he said, you know, never underestimate the importance of a catchphrase.

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It is something that really makes a difference.

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It's not something that I set out to do.

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Like, you do it, people laugh at the table read, so you add it in next week, and then suddenly you have a catchphrase.

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Honey, your hands are filthy.

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Go wash up for lunch.

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Eat my shorts.

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Eat my shorts.

126

I love that.

127

Is that a popular expression?

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Like, what the deuce?

129

Probably more popular.

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Probably way more popular.

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A stand-up comic friend of mine named Steve Marmel, I guess he was a Jerry Lewis fan or something.

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You know, he would say, hey, Guggen.

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I'd be like, oh, Guggen.

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And, you know, so it devolved into this giggity-giggity,

135

this kind of lazy just distilling of Jerry Lewis nonsense sense that then became Giggity, Giggity, Giggity.

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They come from weird places.

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Giggity.

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Ted.

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Ted was conceived as, actually as an animated series.

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It was the same idea.

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It was a guy who had had a teddy bear who had come to life when he was a kid, and now he still had to deal with it.

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The thing was still around.

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But now, he had a wife and kids, and there was a whole family component.

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I kind of went out the window when we had the thought of maybe doing this as a film.

145

I had thought at one point, is this a hand puppet thing?

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Is it like a Greg the Bunny sort of situation?

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I wrote the initial story and then co-wrote the screenplay with Alex Sulkin and Wellesley Wilde.

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I think we pitched it to 20th Century Fox.

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They asked us, can you do a PG-13 version?

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So we went, we wrote a PG-13 version.

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I think at the end of the day, they just felt like this is just too expensive.

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It's too weird.

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It's too risky.

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There's a CGI bear at the center.

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This is going to cost a lot of money, which they weren't wrong.

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So we took it to Universal, who luckily wanted to do it and wanted to do the R-rated version.

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You're in one room with a bunch of suits who don't see it, and another room with a bunch of suits who do.

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Luckily, we landed in the right room.

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It was a pretty simple story in a lot of ways.

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It was something that came out, obviously, my background in animation.

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But there was a movie called Alien Nation with Mandy Patinkin that was about an alien invasion, but it actually took place five years after the aliens had invaded.

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So now they're like, we all kind of work together.

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And that was oddly an influence when it came to Ted.

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It's like, OK, well, we all know the magical fairytale story of the thing that comes to life.

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What's the story that takes place 30 years later?

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And the Muppets were a big influence.

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What I always loved about the Muppets is that there was no gimmick.

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There was never any, the animals can talk, but only this, they can only talk to each other.

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I think the second Muppet movie opened with Kermit and Fozzie are working at a newspaper.

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The world you've created is the world where these things can talk, and they're part of our community.

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It's not, oh my god, that frog can talk.

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It's, that frog just cut me off in traffic.

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If you look at a movie like Ghostbusters, it's like you get one crazy out there thing, and everything else has to be really real.

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And their thing was, OK, there are ghosts running around Manhattan.

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Everything else has to be grounded.

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It's New York City as we know it.

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These guys are basically bug exterminators who happen to catch ghosts.

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Everything else about that world is real, except for this one thing.

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If the teddy bear has come to life, everything else has to be really grounded and normal.

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Like, this is not a fantasy world we're living in.

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This is Boston.

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It's two guys sitting on the couch talking about absolutely inconsequential stuff.

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I mean, but do you think she might be expecting me to make that kind of a move?

184

No, no, I don't think she's...

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And not only that, it's the wrong time.

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It's a terrible idea.

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I mean, you got the economy, you got the credit bubble, the Supreme Court.

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I mean, look at Haiti.

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I guess I didn't think about that.

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Well, that's a fact.

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I mean, it's interesting.

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We're doing a TED series now for Peacock.

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And initially it's like, all right, this is a 22-minute series.

194

To do these moments that have nothing to do with the story, but are just real asides that are so much a part of what the movie was,

195

we're having to kind of rethink how we're doing this, how we structure it.

196

It's one of those things in comedy that's strange, is that things that don't move the story forward are not always things you want to pull out.

197

It illustrates who these people are and not what situation they're in at the moment.

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American Dad.

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American Dad was a direct response to the political climate at the time.

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You know, it was immediate post-9-11.

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The terrorists are everywhere and be on alert.

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And, you know, that was Stan's whole character.

203

I don't know if I can stand watch all night.

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You've kept me up for the past two days practicing singing.

205

Steve, this is an opportunity to step up and be a hero and be a hero.

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Then you'll know what it takes to really sing our national anthem.

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Radio me if you have any problems.

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I'll do my best, Dad.

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I want more than your best, Steve.

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For once, I want you to do fine.

211

Roger was, it was the damage that comes with having that job.

212

Like, I gotta house an alien.

213

You guys thought I tried to kill you?

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Hilarious!

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It's so therapeutic to laugh.

216

You know, we wouldn't have created that show if Family Guy hadn't been canceled.

217

I didn't set out to create two animated shows and have them.

218

I'm very much somebody who likes to work on one thing at a time, see it through to the finish, and then start on something else.

219

They were all in the same building.

220

I was running back and forth all day, every day, dealing with these two shows.

221

And I didn't really feel like I was really running either one.

222

And so I made the choice to delegate it to Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman, who I'd co-created it with,

223

and go back and continue nurturing Family Guy because we hadn't been back from cancellation all that long.

224

In many ways, I'm surprised.

225

When I talk to people in their 20s today, they almost know more about it than I do.

226

How to keep it fresh is always the concern.

227

I mean, I'm not in the writer's room.

228

I haven't been in the writer's room for about 10 years.

229

Do you have a favorite character?

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I don't really have, I mean, at this stage, Brian is the easiest character to voice.

231

Stewie certainly is at the top of that list.

232

Whatever was in my head that day was still paying for my house.

233

But, you know, I look at a character like Roger, and that character is kind of mushroomed into something very different, probably not what I would have done, but people love it.

234

There's no word to describe it.

235

Shmoobly dong?

236

That's not it, but it's close.

237

You can create a character, but other writers might be able to do something more interesting with it.

238

And I think you see that all over television.

239

Brian and Stewie is a good example.

240

There's a writer, Gary Gennetti, and the Brian-Stewie relationship, which is now so central to that show, was something that he really hit upon.

241

It can be good and bad to have a show go this long.

242

I think Family Guy in a lot of ways has consistent ups and downs.

243

I'm not going to be the one to kill it at this point.

244

A million ways to die in the West.

245

I mean, every Western we've ever seen centers around some paragon of nobility and heroism.

246

And most of us aren't like that.

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Most of us are not in the gladiatorial arena.

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We're going like, look at that guy's haircut, huh?

249

That's never who the movie's about.

250

And that's who the Million Ways to Die in the West was about.

251

It was about the person who has a strong sense of self-preservation, as most of us do.

252

What is there to live for on the frontier in 1882?

253

Huh?

254

Let me tell you something.

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We live in a terrible place and time.

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The American West is a disgusting, awful, dirty, dangerous place.

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Look around you.

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Everything out here that's not you wants to kill you.

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Outlaws, angry drunk people, scorned hookers, hungry animals, diseases, major and minor injuries, Indians, the weather.

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You can get killed just going to the bathroom.

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I take my life in my hands every time I walk out to my outhouse.

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The West is so glamorized, it's so romanticized.

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It would have been terrible to live there.

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You know, there's like probably one restaurant, you probably live miles and miles and miles away from town.

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You gotta ride a horse to get there, even when you do.

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There's not that much to do.

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You can go into the saloon, but it's full of assholes, you know, who are there drinking in the middle of the day.

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Probably no ice.

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But you go home and then you just wait for it to get dark and read the Bible.

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Like, what?

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There's nothing to do.

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But Hollywood has been telling us for years, oh, it's this glorious, romantic, epic era in history.

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And again, we were just trying to take a spin something familiar that hadn't really been explored before.

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When I did TED, that was my first foray into live action ever.

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I mean, I'd come out of animation where you plan everything, every shot, you storyboard everything.

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You can't do coverage.

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You can't have a wide shot and a tight shot and an over.

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And I had, in my mind, and sometimes on paper, storyboarded every scene, thinking, all right, we need this shot and this shot, and that's it, moving on.

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And my producer really had had to explain to me

280

that you should probably get some other angles in case you want to mess with it in post.

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And I scoffed at it at the time.

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I had done nothing but animation.

283

I mean, I was asking my director of photography quietly, what's an over, what's a 50-50?

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These terms that as a director, like, hey, you should probably know.

285

It was a smart crew, and it was an experienced crew.

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And they knew that I was very green, but they also knew that I had a clear sense of what I wanted this to be

287

and that I was ready to accept help.

288

As far as the on-camera part of it, Ted itself was not that much of a departure from animation.

289

It was, you know, the physicality was the same as that you do in the booth when you're recording an animated character.

290

The Western was easily the most challenging transition because it's a little more dishonest voiceover work.

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When you're on camera, it's just, there's less of that.

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It has to be, it's so much more nuanced.

293

In many ways, it was about pulling back.

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To this day, it is.

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Even with the Orville, it's about pulling back.

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It's about you don't have to give as much, that less is more.

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The Orville.

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With The Orville, I really wanted to, I've been a fan of sci-fi since I was a kid.

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I love that genre of storytelling.

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The thing that you can do as a writer where you're commenting on something without actually commenting on it, you can take a stance, the popular stance or an unpopular stance,

301

and tell it through the lens of this alien culture and explore alternative viewpoints.

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It's a lot headier when you're working in that genre, and I really wanted to take advantage of that.

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The sequel began as something that was kind of existing between two worlds.

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I think I found pretty early on that I was much more attracted to one world than the other, that I didn't mind, you know,

305

writing the jokes, but I really wanted to tell the sci-fi stories.

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About midway through season two, or maybe a little earlier, and certainly in season three, which is coming up in June,

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we kind of cracked the nut of like, okay, there is a humorous component to this there is a loose component

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but the humor is much more character based you know

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if you're watching ally mcbeal you know

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if you're watching gilmore girls the humor comes from who the people are

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and not from the hard jokes that you would get from a sitcom let me see that shoulder

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does it hurt yeah it hurts like hell that means it's not

313

that bad what are you talking about kelly i literally just said it hurts like hell

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when he's really in pain he gets straight answers with no

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cussing he's just hoping you can give him drugs that's a

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bunch of crap kelly i'm in real pain here i why

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do you have drugs similar to albert i wanted ed to

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be somebody who was a little bit more like somebody who

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might be watching a show like this as opposed to being

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in it you know i watch it i watch a picard

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and i'm a fan but i don't i can't relate to picard

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because that's not what i would do in

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that scenario i'd probably like yeah call me when it's over i've written

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that character in sync with how my my own journey has

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felt to me this ship is what i've been waiting for my entire career.

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I've gotten more comfortable being on camera, I've gotten more comfortable directing, more comfortable with the world of live-action filmmaking,

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and I've tried to kind of translate that into the character so the character evolves.

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He becomes more comfortable in his job, he's a little bit more settled into his chair.

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It's a character that is very different as we go from season to season than he was early on, which is kind of a first.

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With the animated shows, people just stay the same, they're frozen in time.

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With a movie, you're there for an hour and a half and you're gone.

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This is kind of the first time I've had the opportunity

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to really develop characters over the course of a long stretch of time.

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And not just Ed, all the characters, there are nine regulars on that show.

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It's definitely where I've felt the most relaxed and at ease.

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And the Orville might be the most fulfilling experience I've had since I've been in Hollywood.

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What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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What You'll Learn from This Clip

Listen For These Sounds

Say It Like a Native

What is the Shadowing Technique?