Edgar Givry

Born on August 9, 1953, Edgar Givry is one of those actors who grew up on stage before becoming a familiar voice to millions of French people who never knew his face. Trained very young by Jean-Laurent Cochet, he first took the stage in 1970 at the Théâtre Michel in Paris and won the François Périer prize at the Cours Simon in 1972. He has never left the theater, and he also appears on screen in popular French films like Le Dîner de cons (The Dinner Game), La Tour Montparnasse infernale and L'Élève Ducobu, and then in the series Scènes de ménages, where he has played Grégoire since 2018.

But it's dubbing that made him a signature voice. Edgar Givry is the official French voice of John Malkovich, his most prolific partnership, but also of Timothy Dalton, Jeremy Irons and Richard Dean Anderson. A true vocal chameleon, able to go from Malkovich's unsettling elegance to the easygoing charm of an adventure hero. He has also voiced some unexpected characters: from the 1990s onward he became the voice of Kermit the Frog, taking over from Roger Carel, and you can hear him as Cacofonix in Asterix and as the Magic Mirror in Shrek. Over the decades he has even worked as a dialogue adapter for series such as Borgen and United States of Tara.

For Stargate fans, Edgar Givry simply is Jack O'Neill. As Richard Dean Anderson's regular French voice, he has been with him since the MacGyver days, and then throughout the franchise: across all ten seasons of Stargate SG-1, in Stargate Atlantis and all the way to Stargate Universe. Across the hundred-plus SG-1 episodes he dubbed, it's his voice that gave O'Neill his very particular blend of deadpan irony and quiet authority. If you discovered the show in French, it's hard to imagine the colonel, and later general, without Edgar Givry's warm, mischievous voice.