JENNY SLATE IS probably the only actor you’ll come across who holds an affinity with a shell. And not just any shell. A stop-motion one-inch shell wearing tiny shoes, his single eye nestled in the shell’s opening, and with a soft, high yet emotive voice. A shell who enjoys hang-gliding (he uses a Dorito) and skiing (human toenails), and has natural showmanship. Yet, speaking with Empire about the feature-length adventures of Marcel — named after her great-uncle — Slate reflects on just how ingrained she’s become in the character over their journey together. “I was saying to my therapist yesterday, actually, that it’s become way more clear to me what the aspects of his personality are and how they’re connected with my own personality,” she says.
Slate describes Marcel’s voice as the doorway to the character. It came to her in 2010, first as something she was trying out among friends, then as an experimentation during her time on Saturday Night Live. In the one-off sketch, she played a grouchy old woman at Thanksgiving: “We [in America] have this disgusting tradition of pardoning a turkey, and I created this character who was going through the list of the different turkeys and she hated all of them so much. She wanted all of them to become a meal.”