If you don't know him by name, you certainly know Kellen Goff's voice. A prolific voice actor with an impressive resume spanning video games (Five Nights at Freddy's, The Last of Us, Fire Emblem), anime (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer), and movies, and movies (Wicked, Elio, Pokémon), Kellen Goff's career shows no signs of slowing down and it's not hard to see why.
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Boasting incredible range, Goff studied under legendary voice actor Bob Bergen himself. I had the opportunity to sit down with Goff ahead of Five Nights at Freddy's 2 release last year and pick his brain about voice acting, the different mediums he's worked in, working with Scott Cawthon on FNAF, and his role as Toy Freddy in FNAF2.
TheBestWarGames: Did anything about Toy Freddy’s role or the film's approach to the lore strike you as something fans will debate or latch onto before details go public?
Kellen Goff: When I first got cast as Toy Freddy, I believed that Scott and the leadership wanted me to do my best approximation of the legendary performance of Darren Roebuck in Ultimate Custom Night, and it was an honor that I would get to do that some honor.
But as time went on, I found out more about, Toy Freddy’s role in the movie, and it started to become clearer, both through being told and seeing the scenes themselves that the, the goofy mascotty type of voice he put on, evoking Barney the dinosaur type deal, might have thrown viewers for a loop a little bit when it came to what these scenes needed to be, which was a bit more serious.
So we did absolutely try getting it accurate to the original portrayal in Ultimate Custom Night and then we tried something very, very, very scary and deep and growly. And then we tried a little something in between. Having just gone to see it in Florida, the preview screening with Scott Cawthon, I came to find out that the scariest choice was chosen.
To be candid, I'm a bit anxious to hear what Toy Freddy diehards have to think about it because I've seen it expressed a lot that they wanted this portrayal of the character to do justice to the original. The world of FNaF in the movies is so geared toward the fans that most, if not the vast majority of things in these movies, is 1:1 with what the fans remember to completely honor their dedication to the franchise and everything.
But I understand the decision, and I actually very much like the way that it all turned out in the end there, and I truly hope that diehard fans appreciate the direction that was taken as well in the context of the wider story.
As far as FNaF is concerned, what were the major differences between voicing characters for the games versus voicing Toy Freddy in the film?
In the beginning in 2016, it was way looser than usual voiceover sessions come to be, where he only gave me my lines; a Microsoft document of just my lines to say. And he said, 'Just say each one of them a few different times, and I'll pick what I like.' And there, the lack of context is both scary and exciting, much like the game.' It let me take it in any direction I wished; he let me have full creative freedom with whichever direction I would like to take, so long as he got all the choices. And I felt trusted because of that. I still feel trusted to this day because of that. My relationship with Scott is a bit, you know, closer than I would have with, say, a video game by like WB or AdRiot or what have you. It's a direct one-on-one with the creator and producer and game maker and writer all in one.
This feeling of trust has fueled a lot of my performance when it comes to the video game portion of it. To answer your original question, recording by myself, as I said, it can get a little lonely, but it also offered that freedom. As we went on towards Security Breach we got directors, Jason Toplovsky at Steel Wolf Studios, and Brian Friarmouth, both geniuses and also completely open to play and collaboration and all that. They are super cool people, super creative, and super encouraging.
It felt more like a small collaboration on a fun, fun project we were making together. And that's not to say that the movies didn't feel like that. In fact, the first movie was very similar to the way that I did it in the beginning with Scott, where he just gave me the diddly dumbs to do it with no context, and I gave him 8 different takes on my phone — actually, that's all I had at the time when he asked me to record it — and it turned out great because Hollywood sound editors are awesome.
The second one came along, and it turned a bit more traditional, as it, as it tends to be with movie ADR, which thankfully I've done before for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Elio, Minions 2, a good bit of theatrical dubbing, so I wasn't walking in blindsided. It felt like a great evolution of what led up to that point, to have just done it pretty by the skin of our teeth. Just to say, we did it all very scrappy. We did it by ourselves, we got down, we got dirty and did it by ourselves. So to go from that into a professional setting, felt to me like an evolution of the production of the whole thing and felt like the next level, both in my life and for working on this franchise.
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You've studied under some incredibly prolific voice actors in your career. What was it like training under Bob Bergen in particular?
That was transformative. Life-changing, I suppose you could say, because at the time I was 16. My dad had lawyered me into the class because Bob had never had a minor in his class before, but Bob said that I sounded just like him, which I, of course, take as a major compliment to this day.
He took away all the misconceptions I had before, that it was about the acting, not the voice. I came in thinking. 'Oh, I can do voice impressions. I can do funny voices. This voice acting thing must be for me.' I had acting training before, but not like this. Bob was sort of the bridge that married the two different sections of my mind in that regard — the acting that I had learned doing stage productions and the vocal part of it. He described the whole business of it.
He described auditions, brought us through mock auditions, had us do an ensemble recording together for a script of Fraggle Rock, which I to this day have never done anything like in any class, and I wish we could, but, unfortunately, it seems ensemble sessions are getting fewer and fewer as it becomes easier to have each individual actor in the booth. But he opened my eyes on a good bit of things and taught me many, many techniques and considerations to have in the professional part of the world that I still use to this day.
Building off your career a little bit more, your voice acting career spans several forms of media, as you've appeared in numerous video games, TV shows, films. Do you find there to be any unique challenges when approaching these different mediums and roles?
Certainly, yeah. Specifically, dubbing and localization comes to mind first as having the most challenge behind it, in that we have to give not only a convincing performance of this character that we're dubbing, while honoring the original intent and actors' performances, but still Americanizing it, I suppose, bringing it into the culture that we have here and making it more accessible for the masses. There's a lot to think about when you're saying a line within the course of whatever it has to be, 3 seconds, 5 seconds: whether it fits the flaps, what you're saying, what inflections to use to accentuate the performances needed to be conveyed, that maybe the face isn't showing in the moment.
That's sort of a thing in all voice acting, but it can be even more of a challenge when fitting it into a truncated amount of time like that, but it's so rewarding because of that. Those safeguards actually can become security a little bit, hearing what the original actor did. And I'm not sure if this is my actor instinct that I've learned from classes or my being on the autism spectrum, but hearing what an actor has done before me to the picture, it helps so much in formulating how I'm going to do it because I have a different way of being angry than Kenjiro Suda does. And we both go all over the spectrum on that.
So I'd say the dubbing part of it has the most gears that go into it, and past dubbing, I'd say regular video game freeform, regular animation freeform, that just — the chains come off basically. They're golden chains, but with the freeform you can still do what you did within those time limits, but you now have as much time to explore the feeling as you'd like. So there is more opportunity for improv that way, and in that sense, you sort of have to be a bit more on the ball in that other side of your brain. The left side of the brain factors way more into free form than dubbing. I'd say left and right work together more in dubbing. I hope that was cohesive.
Traveling back in time to 2016, what was the casting process like for the Five Nights at Freddy’s games? What got you involved in this franchise to begin with?
Well that, unfortunately, is not as complicated of an answer. When I was coming up on the internet, we had our voice acting club. A lot of us were up and coming and wanted to make sure everybody got the same opportunities, so we would share auditions with each other — with consent, of course, from those who are casting — and make sure that whoever, whichever friend of ours we feel could nail a certain part gets their shot. A friend of mine was kind enough to send me the original sides for Fun Time Freddy in 2016 for FNaF's Sister Location.
At the time, it was heavily, heavily codenamed because we did not know if Scott was coming back to do more Five Nights at Freddy’s. We knew that this audition was from Scott Cawthon, but he had expressed a little bit of a fatigue in having made the first 4 games so closely to each other. So we weren't sure if he was going to come back for a fifth one, but all the same, I adored Five Nights at Freddy's then, and even before I got involved. I love animatronics, so being able to work with Scott Cawthon seemed like a very, very exciting prospect.
The code name at the time for the character was Costumed Entertainer, and all I had to go off of for the specs of it was someone that kids love, but parents would not want to leave children alone with. That was the description. So I tried two different things. I tried the one that you hear today — kind of an exuberant Krusty the Clown, Hannibal Lecter, clownish type — and then I tried something closer to the Medic from Team Fortress 2, German accent and all.
Years later, I would get permission to reveal the second take on Game Theory Live with Matt Pat, and fans to this day have affectionately referred to that take as 'German Fun Time Freddie,' 'the non-canon Freddy that never was,' [fans] come up to my table and ask about it when I'm at conventions. It's such a funny Easter egg to have in the ether. But yeah, Scott ended up choosing Freddy, and I'm very thankful for that because those auditions were done with very little sleep and took the last of my energy before I went back to bed. To have the email that said you got it when you wake up, I've never had that happen since.
That must have felt amazing.
It was. I've had a lot of firsts with Scott, a lot of things that would seem fantastical in any other scenario, but he makes them happen whether on purpose or otherwise.
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Still talking in the casting sphere, did you have to audition for Toy Freddy in the movies, or were you approached?
Toy Freddy, Scott already had me in mind, early on. Scott is so straightforward, it's so refreshing. All the email said is like, 'You want to be the voice of Toy Freddy?' 'Yeah, yeah, absolutely,' and that's all it took. He's like, 'cool.' The people will get in contact with you. Scott has been so, so incredibly kind to me, having me for almost every iteration of Five Nights at Freddy’s, since Sister Location. I love being his little running gag, and I'm grateful that the fans have also come to accept me, which they did quite quickly, thank goodness.
In return, I always do my best to take into account what they find fun about the franchise, with all the memes that they post on TikTok, and do my best to incorporate at least that energy, if not the memes themselves, when I can get away with it. I try my best to make every single character sound different from each other if I can, and I think fans have loved that because they can do a wide range of impressions because of it. The fans love doing impressions of my characters and I'm always so flattered when I hear them.
You've voiced several characters since first joining the franchise in 2016. What's the most challenging asset of bringing their unsettling personalities and the diverse range of voices you do to life?
The unsettlingness of it is, thankfully, often a byproduct of the writer. The writer often gives me perfect vehicles to make seemingly normal conversation into something far more disturbing under the surface. It's a fun little game. So the same as creating different characters for all of them. I do my best in any given franchise where I get to come back for multiple characters to make them as dissimilar from each other as possible because I feel it helps the immersion better. I feel like if you hear the same voice over and over, South Park makes it work, Smiling Friends makes it work, but it may not always in every given situation.
So I do my best to make sure that they sound like different people so that the fans or the player is not taken out of the experience. And I am grateful that I practiced, stretching out my range so often when I was a kid. Thankfully I have the throat for it as well, that majorly helps out with it to accomplish this stuff.
Maybe this is like picking a favorite child, but who's your favorite character to voice in FNaF?
That is exactly what I always say, it's like picking a favorite child, and unfortunately, I just can't do it, Renan. I wish I could. I really wish I could give a better answer, but fact of the matter is, at least in my mind, I feel if I picked a favorite, it would do a disservice to the rest of them, because there's something that I love about each and every one of them.
I will say there are ones that I got to spend more time with and have dug a deeper nook into my heart. Glam Rock Freddy is the longest I've spent on any given character, I believe at 10 hours of recording. We had a lot of time to flesh out his dad-ish awkwardness, his sweetness, his willingness and want to protect... And his juxtaposition very much from other animatronics in his approachableness and want to protect as opposed to harm.
I really like being nice characters. Being the villain over and over — I adore being the villain, don't get me wrong. It's always juicy, it's always a blast, but being characters that someone comes up to me at a convention and says '[that character] got my nonverbal brother to talk for the first time,' or '[that character was] my father figured during lockdown,' or '[that character] saved my life. More often characters like that tend to be the more approachable ones, and I'm just very grateful when I get the chance to be those.
And same with Sun and Moon, I got a chance to incorporate parts of my own autism into their characters as well, and I'd like to think it gave a bit more visibility to the autism community and showed that... We're not hindered by the cards that life has given us; we are empowered by them.
Speaking about your history voicing villains, you voiced some of the biggest anime villains of the past decade. I mean, you're Overhaul. What type of hero would you want to voice if given the opportunity? Is there a particular character you'd like to voice who's not a straight-up villain? Overhaul is a bit of an anti-villain, depending on your stance there.
Overhaul is — he doesn't want to kill everybody. At the core of it, he wants to save the world; he just goes about it in a very broken, disturbing, not kosher way. But if I were to be a hero, I don't know. Just any kind of hero would be so fun. I guess the reluctant hero is always really fun. The goofball, the outcast, the one that rises out of being shunned by society and becomes welcomed by it, like Denji from Chainsaw Man. That kind of thing. He's just a poor, sorry dude and then he gets the power to help people, and so he does. And people come to love him because of it. I think that's the kind of character or the kind of hero I'd like to be.
Building off what you said about Overhaul, sometimes villains do have a redeemable side we can relate to, but many of the characters you've voiced do tend to be pretty monstrous or have a dark side to them. How do you get in the mindset to relate to those characters? What headspace do you have to put yourself in to really get those performances, performances down?
Whereas if it's a villain like Overhaul... He's despicable. I want to say that there's no excuse for doing what he did. But where he comes at it from, having been an orphan and being taken in by this father figure who's the head of the Shie Hassaikai, and just wanting to do everything in his power to pay back that kindness that was given to him, to honor the sacrifices that his pops has made. At the core of it, every villain thinks they're the hero, and every villain thinks what they're doing is completely justified if it brings about a result they feel will make their world better. Living on the street can and does mess with one's head.
I have been honored to know many people who haven't had homes in my life, and to talk to them about what it's like to do what you need to do to survive, and I feel that's where Overhaul came from. He took that instinctual, primal survival that he had to rely on in his years on the streets and applied it toward giving, giving back to someone. And the two don't mix very well when it comes to method. So, yeah, I feel like in another life Overhaul might have been able to help a lot of people. His power is to break someone apart and put them back together without any disease, any wounds. He could have been instrumental in a revolution of healthcare, but unfortunately, he had the upbringing that he did and chose a different path. I have hope that he can be redeemed, but it will take a lot of work on his part.
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Is there any character you've played that you personally relate to or empathize with in particular?
Sasaki in Sasaki and Mino, that is one of the greatest roles I could have ever asked for, because it is so, so much the juxtaposition of everything that's come before in my career. He is the cutest, gayest, nicest, fellow. He's just a soft boy, and he's non-toxic. He always asks consent. He's just everything I aspire to be myself in a scenario like that. Bringing myself to Sasaki was a big collaborative effort by the lovely director Emily Fajardo and myself. A lot of Sasaki's reads and intonations, a lot of the improv that we did is pretty much what I would say or do in the same scenario, me, Kellen, I, those are, that's the way, where my voice would go. Those are pretty much the things I would say.
A lot of the time he gets kind of this cutesy little voice that doesn't really translate well over text, I'm sorry to say, but that is the way that my mom and I talked to each other growing up. So being able to bring something from my mom into a character and performance as pure as this has been one of the greatest honors of my career. And he also helped me become more comfortable and discover more my bisexuality. Living what I was afraid to live through him made me realize that I could do it and there was nothing to be afraid of.
You're part of one of the most prolific horror franchises of the 21st century, but are there any other horror franchises you still dream of being a part of?
Oh, does Bioshock count? I adore the BioShock universe. I'd love to be part of that. I was lucky enough to be chosen to be a part of Dead Space, which was one of my favorite horror video games growing up, part of the Dead Space remake, so that one was my answer before, but being a part of it now, I’m very grateful to be. Past that, it's tough. If Alan Wake ever got another installment, I would love to contribute to that universe as well. And then, of course, you know, Scream and Chucky and all that. If we're talking big screen stuff, Universal Monster stuff would be so much fun. I would love to contribute to any of those worlds.
So you voice a lot of scary characters. How do you describe the sliding scale of scariness when it comes to voice acting, if that's even a thing we can quantify?
I'd say it's less of a scale and more of an alignment chart, but there are so many different columns and rows that it's tough to put one singular point. You know when you're playing Pokémon and you've got the chart between HP attack, special attack and it's that shape form. I'd say it's a lot like that, and that is a long-winded way to say there are many different factors into making different types of scary, something can be soft to be creepy, it can be loud to be terrifying, it can be soft to be terrifying. There are a plethora of different methods of how to make something unsettling.
I would say the easiest way for a classically traditional antagonistic scary character is — the sliding scale would be their demeanor, and it can be anywhere from just a whisper to always loud all the time grating on the ears. But I feel the best is sort of somewhere in the middle, but sliding from the left end to the right end as time goes on. To be quiet and unsettling, suspicious, and then to have those suspicions confirmed as you get more and more unhinged as time goes on. I love staying in the subtler, more creepier stuff. A fun character has a lot of diversity in their actions and feelings, just like a human does.
Sticking to the horror genre for a little bit longer, are there any played-out horror tropes that you're just ready to see die off in the industry?
Don't hate me. I'm kind of sick of the zombie survival thing. I have been for a good bit. There are ways to do it very well, like Last of Us does it incredibly well, Left for Dead did it awesome, but it feels like it's gotten to the point of oversaturation. You can tell a number of different ways how the zombie apocalypse came to be, but at the end of the day, it's the zombie apocalypse. It's you holding yourself up in a dark, damp room with a shotgun and hopefully not getting noticed by the hordes of what used to be your best friends outside for the rest of your life.
It's not just horror at that point. Personally, for me, it's just depressing. I'm kind of sick of going back to that, 'it's all hopeless, and all we can hope for is to go to a different continent and start life anew' kind of thing. I'm tired of apocalypse stories, at least for now. I feel like there are different ways to touch on horror, something that can be overcome, some way to cure everyone, which zombie stories have done. I will give them the benefit of the doubt there.
There have been zombie stories where everyone got cured, but more often than not, it's just a slog of hopelessness one bit after the other. Little highs of reprieve when they find a Twinkie or something, but then just going straight back into these characters that you've loved dying in horrific ways and becoming the person that wants to kill you. So, to answer your question: zombies. For me personally, even though I adore playing zombies, it's just not the kind of story I'm really interested in anymore.
What's your absolute favorite Five Nights at Freddy’s game?
It's got to be FNaF World. As we've seen through this interview, I am a bit of a gamer and growing up with RPGs like Pokémon and Earthbound and all that and, Super Mario RPG, seeing FNaF turn into that was a hard right turn, but one that I was like, 'What? Cool!'
That's what I really like about Scott, he likes to do the thing that's not very expected. If he listens to the fans and he tries, at least — I can't speak for the guy, but based on historical evidence, it feels like he does his best to subvert expectation at every corner, if he can, and to encourage probable deniability, I suppose, in the process of it.
As 2025 draws to a close, what are some of your favorite video games and movies of the year?
I have such a short-term memory. Dispatch was really fun. I loved playing Pokémon Legends Z-A, I thought that there were elements in there that I have been wanting from Pokémon for a while. The turn-based aspect, I'm glad they found a different way to spin that where it's just like you can actually dodge poison spikes or Protect doesn't necessarily mean you're completely protected anymore. The substitute just puts a doll in front of him and you can just walk around it. I think that’s hilarious.
Have you seen Frankenstein?
I haven't. I've really wanted to. Sinners, watching Sinners, masterful work there. I'm curious to see what comes in the future, honestly. I'm a big MCU guy still. Superman was awesome. Superman just — going back to the whole zombie thing, when everything feels hopeless — that Superman just brought so much hope and love and life into not just my life, but everybody around me who's seen it, and it just, it felt happy again. I love seeing hopeful stories about a dude who does good because it's good. I loved Fantastic Four as well. I think they got a lot of the characteristics of the family spot-on, and I loved seeing on-screen a comic book-accurate Galactus finally. So yeah, those are my faves, I think.
- Release Date
- December 5, 2025
- Runtime
- 104 Minutes
- Director
- Emma Tammi
Cast
-
Josh HutchersonMike -
Piper RubioAbby -
Elizabeth LailVanessa -
Matthew LillardWilliam Afton
- Writers
- Scott Cawthon
- Producers
- Jason Blum, Scott Cawthon
- Prequel(s)
- Five Nights at Freddy's
- Franchise(s)
- Five Nights at Freddy's
