Peter Cullen, the voice actor who made OPTIMUS PRIME sound like a leader worth following and Eeyore sound like the saddest, sweetest donkey in the Hundred Acre Wood, died Wednesday at his Los Angeles home. He was 85.
“Peter Cullen passed away peacefully, surrounded by his loving family — and held in the hearts of his many friends and countless fans worldwide,” Cullen’s family said in a statement. “His family asks that you honor his remarkable legacy by serving your communities and leading others with compassion, integrity and loyalty, and always remember, ‘be strong enough to be gentle.'”
Cullen’s agent, Kevin Motley, confirmed the death to ABC News on Thursday. No cause of death has been released.
Born in Montreal in 1941, Cullen spent more than five decades building one of animation’s most recognizable resumes. He voiced Optimus Prime from the original 1984 TRANSFORMERS cartoon through Michael Bay’s 2007 live-action reboot and its sequels, and he even reprised the role for a cameo on FOX’s THE MASKED SINGER in 2024.
Cullen didn’t invent Optimus Prime’s voice so much as borrow it. He built the character around advice his older brother, a Marine named Larry, gave him before he ever auditioned for the part.
Related: TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION
“Be strong enough to be gentle,” Cullen recalled Larry telling him in a 2014 interview with NPR. “I had no idea what the script was going to be. But in effect, the lines just came out, and I just did my brother, Larry.”
That’s the same line his family chose to close his obituary. Whatever shaped a cartoon robot’s voice 40 years ago apparently shaped the man too.
Cullen ranked Eeyore right behind Optimus Prime on his own list of favorite roles.
“Well, Optimus Prime, No. 1. He’s my above-all favorite. The second one was Eeyore,” Cullen told NPR, explaining that the gloomy donkey from A.A. Milne’s WINNIE THE POOH stories “was simply charming.” Watching kids’ faces light up when Eeyore muttered his signature line, “Hello. Thanks for noticing me,” ranked among the great joys of his career, he said.
Cullen’s voice turned up all over Hollywood beyond those two roles. He growled as the title creature in 1976’s KING KONG, helped design sound effects for the alien hunter in 1987’s PREDATOR, played KARR on KNIGHT RIDER, voiced Monterey Jack on CHIP ‘N DALE: RESCUE RANGERS, and more recently lent his voice to Thaedus on Prime Video’s INVINCIBLE. The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2023 Children’s & Family Emmy Awards.
Movieguide® has tracked the TRANSFORMERS franchise across most of its run, giving 2014’s AGE OF EXTINCTION three out of four stars for entertainment quality and calling it possibly “the best TRANSFORMERS movie by Michael Bay” for its themes of family loyalty and self-sacrifice, while still flagging heavy profanity and nearly constant action violence as reasons to keep younger viewers away.
Optimus Prime was never really about the size of his robot body or the scale of his explosions. He was a commander who kept choosing sacrifice over domination and gentleness over force — a strange thing for an action franchise to build its hero on, and exactly the thing that made Cullen’s performance last more than 40 years. Families who grew up quoting “Autobots, roll out” or reciting “Hello. Thanks for noticing me” lost the same man this week, which says something about how far one voice can carry.
Questions or comments? Please write to us here.
