Super Mario Galaxy Star Jack Black Wants This Game Of Thrones Actor To Join The Franchise

Universal

The nostalgic arc of the animated "Super Mario Bros." films to date has been a little strange. 2023's "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" took characters and music cues from the 1985 NES game "Super Mario Bros.," of course, but the characters were modeled after their appearances from the GameCube era on, circa 2001. The film also incorporated elements from throughout the "Mario" video game property, plucking details and villains from across the vast scope of Mario history.

To an old-school Nintendo fan like myself, this seems odd. Surely, my limited imagination dictated, the first "Super Mario Bros. Movie" would only incorporate Mario details from early in the franchise. After that, the sequel might skip ahead a bit, incorporating characters from the Mario games released from 1991-2001. To me, it's logical to trace nostalgia in a straight line. Instead, the Mario movies go all over the place. Even the 2026 sequel "The Super Mario Galaxy Movie" skips straight from 1985 to 2007, borrowing its name and setup from the eponymous Nintendo Wii game.

This nitpicking about chronology is all, I admit, a way to express frustration over both movies' failure to incorporate Wario, a character who's functionally Mario's evil twin. Wario first turned up in the 1992 video game "Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins," so it stood to reason that he'd turn up in the second Mario movie, right? So far, though, we've missed the Wario Wenaissance. 

But I may yet get my. Speaking with Gamespot, actor Jack Black, who plays Bowser in the animated "Super Mario" movies, said that he feels Wario should appear in the all-but-guaranteed sequel set up by the post-credits scenes for "The Super Mario Galaxy Movie." More so, Black thinks Wario should be voiced by Oberyn Martell himself, "Game of Thrones" veteran Pedro Pascal.

HBO

Starting in the early 1990s and continuing on to 2023, Charles Martinet voiced both Mario and various video game iterations of Wario. After that, the role of Mario was (somewhat controversially) assumed by Chris Pratt for the animated "Super Mario" movies.

When interviewed by Gamespot, however, Jack Black observed that there's no guarantee that the fire-breathing Bowser will serve as the main antagonist in the next "Super Mario" film, particularly given what happens to the character in "The Super Mario Galaxy Movie" (which I won't spoil here). Instead, he suggested that Mario's "evil twin" Wario would be the more fitting villain for the inevitable third chapter in the "Super Mario" animated movie franchise. (On a related note: In the mythology of the "Super Mario" video games, Wario is not actually Mario's sibling. The two merely look like they could be related.) 

To quote Black on the matter:

"You know, what if there is a more powerful, more evil villain? Then I may need to be turned to help Mario and the rest to defend our universe against some other unseen force of evil. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?' [...] Wario. Pedro Pascal is Wario."

Of course, Pedro Pascal has plenty of experience working on massive blockbusters, having starred in "The Mandalorian and Grogu," "The Fantastic Four: First Steps," and "Gladiator II." He similarly has experience voicing animated characters, having portrayed a talking fox in "The Wild Robot." As such, there's a very real chance that the actor — who's so hot right now — could even wind up being tapped to voice Wario in the future. Keep it tuned to /Film for more on that front.