Who Voiced Stewie's Bear Rupert On Family Guy?
There's a long and glorious history of silent cartoon characters suddenly piping up for dramatic effect: Nibbler from "Futurama," Maggie from "The Simpsons," even Silent Bob from the "Clerks" cartoon show, if you really want to stretch.
But few characters' decisions to speak up were quite as unforeseeable as the one featured in the Season 5 "Family Guy" episode "Stewie Loves Lois," where audiences first heard the voice of Rupert, teddy bear of the matricidal infant Stewie Griffin (Seth MacFarlane). After Rupert is shredded by an unfriendly dog, Stewie pleads for the stuffed animal to return to life, promising that the two of them will go to Hawaii together and kicking off one of the show's trademark cutaway gags: Rupert, now a teddy bear head on a muscular gentleman's body, frolicking in the waves with Stewie and expressing his gratitude for a perfect day.
As shows about dimwitted suburban dads go, "Family Guy" has a long memory, and Rupert's handful of speaking parts in the following years would all sound suspiciously similar thanks to the series' dedication to continuity. For four largely inconsequential appearances stretching across nine seasons, the toy bear would consistently be played by voice actor David Boat — you might not know him, but your ears do.
There's something familiar about Rupert from Family Guy
Checking out David Boat's resume, he's basically the definition of a working voice actor. His credits bounce back and forth from beloved, universally-known comic book heroes (Thor in "Ultimate Avengers: The Movie" and Marvel's "Superhero Squad" series, The Thing in "Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H.") to half a dozen variations on the words "Additional Voices" across a panoply of video games, like 2018's "God of War," 2019's "Days Gone," and the same year's "Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order." He's even credited with perhaps the highest and most anonymous credit to which a voice artist can aspire, playing "Sim" in a handful of "The Sims" games circa 2004.
The folks at "Family Guy" especially seem to like him. Boat's voice has been featured on nine separate episodes of "Family Guy," and he's played a decent spectrum of weirdos. On top of Rupert the Bear, he first showed up voicing "Hand #1" during a vignette in the fourth season episode "The Fat Guy Strangler." He also brought characters to life in Season 5's "Hell Comes to Quahog," Season 8's "Dial Meg for Murder," and Season 9's "Brothers and Sisters." His last appearance on the show was in Season 13, where he returned again to the part of Stewie's darling teddy bear, reassuring the other stuffed animals in the room that he and Stewie were, in spite of appearances to the contrary, not romantically involved.