Raising the hoof

Who: Chris Rock
What: Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa also featuring the voices of Ben Stiller, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Sacha Baron Cohen, Alec Baldwin, Bernie Mac
When & where: Opens at cinemas on December 18

Along with the rest of the star-studded cast, Chris Rock returns for
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, the sequel to the 2005 animated hit about a group of gentrified New York zoo animals lost in the wild. In this one though, Rock isn't just playing Marty the Zebra. He's voicing a whole herd of them as the gang find themselves on the plains of Africa where they encounter their own species - and some family connections.

Having been Downunder for a stand-up tour which visited Auckland in August, Rock was back in Sydney on the promotional trail for the movie which has already grossed more than $US160 million stateside.

So you were in New Zealand just a few months back?
I thought the audiences were great. I thought just driving in and turning on the radio it just seemed a hipper place than here actually. It was very ... there's a lot of hip-hop and R&B and just a soulful
place. I kind of liked it.

So are you feeling happy about the world? You're a zebra in a cartoon and Barack Obama is President ...
I'm definitely very happy about Barack Obama. He's qualified. It's
not like some bus driver won the presidency. "Hey Willy the bus driver is president, this is huge, this is unprecedented." I got excited. It didn't hit me until they announced it - I am witnessing something I didn't think I would ever see or didn't think I would see as a young man. Wow. OK that's good. What next?

The reality will set in at some point.
Yeah, any good team which wins a championship is thinking about next year by the end of the day.

And there you are playing a black and white character in Africa.
I'm playing a black and white character in Africa, yes.

Do you think that has its own historical resonance?
[Laughs] I wouldn't go that far. It's good man.

This movie kicks it up a gear from the last one.
It's much better than the first. This feels like the third year of a good sitcom - the first two years of a sitcom they are always trying to figure out things and there is all these weird experiments that go awry. But in Seinfeld or whatever, the third year - every episode is funny.

Having to do all those other voices this time, did you think "I should be paid more"?
No, I thought it but I didn't say it. But they paid me fine, they take good care of me.

How does your stand-up experience relate to voicing a character like this?
The thing about animated movies is you are really encouraged to over-
act. It's not like a normal movie where less is more. Animated movies totally just ham it up. Ham! Ham! Ham!

And they film you when you are doing your lines?
Yeah, there is a camera from the moment you walk in the studio.

Which they use as a blueprint for expressions on the character. Isn't that scary? Like doesn't it steal your soul?
It's fine, I don't really think about it that much. The thing about when you do one of these movies is that people have been great at it and you should always aspire to that - think about Robin Williams in Aladdin or Nathan Lane in The Lion King, Eddie Murphy in Shrek. These are like Oscar calibre actors here. So you are trying to get a decent performance. I saw Kung Fu Panda - I thought it was the best Dustin Hoffman has been in 20 years. This is an amazing performance. I told him that, he was a little taken aback.

It's weird because you are in it but you are not it and you don't want to get compared to your work when you are live action. Even when you are live action they cut it together and make a performance. The performance is slightly artificial. There are all sorts of things which create your
performance. So when you think about it that way, it's not that different.

With these sorts of movies much of the marketing is based on having high-profile voices such as yourself. But don't you end up doing more
talking about the movie than you do in the movie?
You kind of probably do more press than you actually do in the movie but
I remember Bernie Mac [the veteran comedian who voices Zuba in the film, but who died in August] once said to me "they don't pay you to do movies, they pay you to sell movies".

It's sad about him.
It really is sad. But it's not a bad one to go out on.

Do you actually encounter the rest of the cast when you're recording
your lines?
I worked with Ben [Stiller] one time and that was a lot of fun. The
rest of them you don't see - sometimes you are out at a party and you see Jada [Pinkett Smith] - "hey we're working on a movie together", "I know".