Josh Gad may have brought the snowman Olaf to life in the animated “Frozen” franchise, but he now regrets one acting choice he made about the role.
Gad, who voiced Olaf in 2013’s “Frozen” and its 2019 sequel, “Frozen II,” says he wishes now that he hadn’t used his real speaking voice to play the character.
“If I could do it all over again, I would not have lent that snowman my voice. I would have created a different voice,” Gad said in a recently filmed at Fan Expo Canada that was posted on the event’s TikTok page.
The problem? Kids everywhere hear Gad’s voice and immediately think of Olaf.
“It’s very weird being in a supermarket and having a little child go like this,” said Gad while imitating a little one looking up at him in wonder.
“That was my first big mistake,” he added.
Gad said he’s been told he has a “very unique” voice. “So as much as I like to try to change it up. … People seem to like my voice, so I try to give it to them when I can,” he told fans.
The Fan Expo account teasingly captioned the video, “Let it go, Josh.”
Fans of “Frozen” commented on the video to say they could never imagine Olaf without Gad’s voice.
“Olaf wouldn’t be Olaf without HIS voice,” wrote one, while another compared Gad’s voice to a “warm hug.”
Someone else called Gad’s voice “iconic,” writing, “It makes Olaf seem so gentle and innocent and smart and oblivious and …”
Another “Frozen” fan shared a happy parenting memory that’s connected to Gad’s portrayal of Olaf. “Olaf’s voice brings so many smiles. It was one of my daughter’s first words. ‘Want Ooooooolaf,'” the person wrote.
On Sept. 17, Gad visited TODAY with Hoda & Jenna, where he opened up to Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager about how his own daughters, Ava, 13, and Isabella, 10, were the inspiration behind his debut children’s book, “PictureFace Lizzy,” out now.
“My daughters inspired it by asking me incessantly to give them TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and every other app. They came to me and they’re like, ‘All my friends have it,'” he said.
Keeping his kids off social media hasn’t been easy, he told Hoda and Jenna.
“It’s a very difficult choice because my girls have the most incredible imaginations and their power of imaginative play is something I don’t want them to leave behind for the purposes of staring down at technology,” he said.
“So I decided to put it in a book, put it from their perspective and have this conversation about what does it mean to have a healthy balance between imaginative play and technology.”
Gad recalled “freaking out” the first time he read Ava and Isabella the book. Luckily, their responses were encouraging.
“They looked at me and they go, ‘Can you read that again?'” he said.
“And then, we were on vacation with our friends and they had me read it to their friends and I was like, ‘I think I hit the jackpot.'”
He then quipped, “Suffice it to say, I just gave my girl all of those things that I wrote in the book about not doing.”
Gad quickly clarified that he only gave his older daughter access to Snapchat, with parental controls and oversight.
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