How JP Karliak Brought X-Men ‘97’s Morph To Life

Morph X-Men 97

Fans rejoiced earlier this year when it was announced that X-Men ‘97 would be hitting Disney+ and continuing on the legendary X-Men: The Animated Series. With a few episodes under its belt, the reaction has been great so far, and the series got 4 million views within a week of its release.

X-Men ‘97 picks up right after the events of The Animated Series, following Charles Xavier’s death and Magneto’s failed attempt to take over the world. It brings back pretty much every character you’d want to see — from Wolverine and Storm to Cyclops and Rogue. But one fan favorite character in particular made a triumphant return, with a touching new outlook: Morph.

In X-Men ‘97, Morph becomes the first openly nonbinary character in Marvel animated history, a pretty momentous occasion and a huge leap forward for Marvel’s on-screen representation. Morph is voiced in the new series by J.P. Karliak, perhaps best known for his work on The Boss Baby: Back in Business.

Shortly before the series aired, we had the opportunity to sit down with Karliak in a one-on-one interview to talk about the experience of growing up queer in America in the ‘90s, how it helped him prepare for his role as Morph, and everything he’s doing to make sure queer people see more representation on- and off-screen.

GLHF: What was it like for you growing up queer in America?

JP Karliak: I was very fortunate that my mother came to understand it. I'm not gonna say quickly, but before my dad did, she's always been an empath. So she was very much on the same page with me from fairly early on and then my dad… it took a while. My dad was very hung up on very specific forms of masculinity that I just never exhibited and he always struggled with that.

But I think I'm fortunate that before he passed, which was a little over 10 years ago, we got on the same page. He understood where I was coming from, he understood who I was and we had some really good moments of being on the same wavelength, which was nice.

Aside from that, the place that I grew up was, you know, we had movie theaters and coffee houses and stuff like that, but it was a small town, for sure. And I was fortunate to have a tiny little group of band geeks who were also, you know, varying degrees of queer and that I got to hang around with and we supported each other through some, you know, pretty difficult bullying.

It was a difficult place to grow up. It was a difficult time to grow up, I think, for anybody in the nineties.

But also I think there are elements of what kids go through today that I am so glad I never had to go through. But at the same time I feel awful that they do have to go through it, like social media and gender politics and just so many things that were not quite the same as they were, you know, when I was growing up.

You mentioned you had band geek friends, are you a musician yourself?

I mean, I took piano lessons as a kid. My dad thought it would be good for me to join the band. He wanted me to have a variety of extracurricular activities since I was not a sports person. So he encouraged me to join the band and the only instrument that a keyboard player can play [in band] is keyboard percussion. So, like xylophone, glockenspiel, vibraphone, like all of the phones, it was great.

I was actually just, I was just looking at photos of my band experience, my band director from high school just passed away. And I was just thinking about the band family that we had. For anybody who's been in a marching band, it's a really tightly knit group. I mean, they're usually your home room for, you know, all four years that you're in high school for and you spend so much time together almost every weekend.

And, yeah, it was a dysfunctional group for sure. But it was a good group. It was a really good group. I was lucky to have them, you know?

How did you get into acting and voice acting?

I mean, I always loved cartoons as a kid, I was obsessed with them. I did some children's theater when I was a kid and I just absolutely fell in love with it. I also always loved movies — it just always felt like such a natural thing.

I was under some delusion after seeing Aladdin when I was a kid that… like, I saw Robin Williams do what he was doing and I was like, “OK, I want to do what he's doing.” What is Robin Williams? Robin Williams is a famous Hollywood on-camera actor. Ergo, I need to become a famous on camera Hollywood actor and then they will let me do voiceover anyway. So that was sort of my trajectory.

I went to college and, you know, my whole thing was I was going to do theater or, and film and get on camera and become famous and then get to do voiceover. Luckily, I had some wonderful professors that disabused me of that notion that were like, “or you could just audition for voiceover, how about that?”

I got into it and I was pursuing on-camera and voiceover at the same time. But I found that on-camera was getting more and more limiting in its typecasting and a lot of it just because, you know… I am who I am, it was very like, “hey Mary, what's going on girl?”

Like, you know, my voiceover career was providing me an entire outlet of playing all sorts of characters, ostensibly both straight and gay. So it was fun to really see what the possibilities were there. And I just left on-camera behind and only do voiceover.

In the original X-Men: The Animated Series, Morph had a much more masc-presenting identity. Here, in X-Men ‘97, they’ve transitioned into a much less gendered, nonbinary role. Did you have any considerations for bringing that character forward into that new identity?

I was reading an interview with the creators of the original series and, and I tend to agree with what they said in the sense that Morph has always been nonbinary. It's just now we have the language to be able to describe what he is and to be fair, like Morph being a person in the nineties, he still doesn't have that terminology.

Morph has always been nonbinary ... It's just now we have the language to be able to describe what he is.

There's that gender identity thing swirling in his head that he won't have the language for, for another 30 years, one hopes that he survives, you know, but that’s also the reason why his pronouns are he/him. Because they/them, I don't think it was at all mainstream, you know, in the nineties.

For me, it was really important to, I think, Morph is not in his teens, but to really just tap into how I felt in the nineties as a genderqueer kid who didn't know how to say that, who just knew that he, y’know, was. I just went by, “I'm a gay guy who's on the feminine side,” but it would just take so much longer to be able to have that understanding and terminology, let alone the acceptance that comes with it.

So I think, I think more in a way even though it's never overt, Morph kind of goes through that journey as well as somebody who's undergone some very traumatic experiences from the original show who just rejoined the team at the very last episode. He's now just brand new back to the team and is sort of figuring out like where he fits, how is he accepted?

And despite all of that insecurity and all of the trauma that he still has within him, he plays so much of it off with humor, which is such a naturally queer thing to do. So I love him because of how much I identify with all of those qualities.

What do you think of Morph’s friendship with Logan?

I feel like there's a balance of not wanting to make it about like, you know, Morph is in love with Logan, like, because I don't think that's what it is, really. I don't know if we'll ever explore a love interest for Morph. I hope we do. That would be if Morph is not aromantic or asexual, I hope that we may and that's something he wants. I hope we explore it.

But yeah, I think there's a certain beauty in it, you know? In college I had perhaps one of the most wonderful friendships with a straight guy, and it was never about attraction. It was never about that sort of “will they, won’t they?” type of thing, it was really about just camaraderie and understanding and being able to hold space for each other. It reminded me so much of a Frodo and Samwise kind of friendship, although we would argue over who was who.

But, yeah I think it was just so important for me to make [Morph and Logan’s friendship] feel like we weren't playing into some expectation of what it was supposed to be. It was just like, “no, these, these guys are just friends,” and it's great.

X-Men has always hit close to home for a lot of people in the LGBTQ+ community. How much experience did you have with the franchise before taking on the role of Morph?

I didn't watch the original series when it was on the air that much because, as I tell people,when I would get home from school, the credits were rolling for the end and I was sitting down to watch the Power Rangers, which was my thing. But then the movies came out and I became obsessed with the movies and all of the characters and, with the advent of Wikipedia and YouTube, I started getting to do the deep dives of like, “wait, who's that mutant running in the background? I wanna know more about them.”

Really delving into it and learning about that, that's really how I developed my love for all of the X-Men.

So I became a lot more off book of who they are and what the lore surrounding them is. And then when the audition came around, that's when I actually started looking back to the original series and being like, “oh, this is actually really good and it's so camp.” I live for it, it’s great.

Having a nonbinary lead character in a Marvel animated series is a bit of a momentous occasion, as there’s not a lot of nonbinary representation in mainstream media. Was there a lot of pressure to get things right and do the role justice?

Yes and no. I mean, I think there's always the pressure of doing a legacy character or a legacy series that's returning. There's so much expectation of what people have in their minds, of how they felt when watching the original series when they were younger.

But as far as really being able to get into Morph’s queerness, I think because it's something that I so intrinsically understand myself and is so authentic to me, it's not something that I feel I need to put on for Morph. It’s like “That part’s in the bag, that part I got.” It’s more about, do I fit into the world? Am I sticking out like a sore thumb or do I blend in with all these other characters? I think that was the greater concern.

I knew that there would be blowback, because there's always gonna be blowback, and people have things to say even though it seems so utterly ridiculous because of what the X-Men stand for from their inception.

But I felt like what was so important to me as far as his queerness goes was just doing a good job portraying a superhero because I want those queer kids out there today with everything going on and the amount of hatred swirling around them right now for them to feel that there are positive representations, there are there are cartoon characters that sound like them and feel like they do and that they're not alone in this. I think that that was the real key part for me.

I don't care if Morph is everybody's favorite character, but I do care that queer people can find some solace in Morph's existence.

You saw the first three episodes of X-Men ‘97 a few days ago. Give me your honest opinion, what did you think of it?

I was gobsmacked. I mean, I think we all knew it would be good. The original series was good and we knew the team that was involved. We knew how much they all loved it, we knew it would be a beautiful love letter. You expect that when a good group of people is assembled, you're gonna get something at the very least decent.

I don't think anybody in that room, aside from the people who had watched the final cuts prior to that night, had any idea just how good it was going to be. It is truly mesmerizing how beautiful it is not only as in the way that it recaptures so much of what made the original great, but in the way that it, in slight ways, updates and improves upon it all.

It works so well. It's exactly what you want it to be. It was definitely a show created on a shoestring budget back in the day, and there are so many elements that the original creators and the original people involved in it probably imagined or they hoped it would be.

But they're like, “well, we have limitations here,” but then you see this version of it, it's like that's what they always wanted. That's what it was supposed to be. So, that's really fun.

You quit Twitter last year, talk me through what happened there.

I did, it wasn't that dramatic for me. I barely used Twitter before that. It was so like it was, you know, whatever anyway. It's the level of toxicity. And I mean, honestly, it's on every social media platform. I find that I can get around it a little better on Instagram. That may change.

I'm actually remembering back to why I did this thing, it also had to do with Elon Musk. I don't want to be on an antisemitic social media platform. Get me out of here, I had no interest in that.

And I will say that Queer Vox, which is the nonprofit that I run, we're still on Twitter. And the only reason being is that a lot of the things that we're trying to do is to help our members get employment opportunities in the industry. It is still a major platform that is used for those opportunities.

So for the time being like, you know, we'll still make use of it, but it's not, it is certainly not my favorite place to be by any means. But yeah, I think with any social media, whether it's coming to a platform, leaving a platform, lessening your appearance on a platform, it all has to do with personal mental health. You don't owe anything to anybody, you can step back.

Tell me about Queer Vox and what its goal is.

Queer Vox is a nonprofit academy and community for LGBTQIA+ voice actors. Our goal is to educate, support, and uplift queer voice actors while also working with the industry to talk to them about authentic and diverse casting and how to help create long-lasting career opportunities for queer voice actors.

Queer Vox was born out of talking with some casting friends where we were simultaneously celebrating the rise of queer characters in media, both animation and video games. But also they were bemoaning the fact that they couldn't authentically cast them, that they were often played by straight or cis people. And I'm like, “well, I know they exist, they're out there, we just have to find them.”

So it started out as a class and it's grown into a Discord and an online talent directory and industry facing workshops. So it's been a really beautiful experience growing this thing and seeing what it's turned into.

Just before the start of the most recent season of Bob’s Burgers, it was announced that one of the trans characters, Marshmallow, would be voiced by a trans woman after having previously been voiced by a cis man, and that was a very exciting moment for a lot of people.

Yeah, it's nice to see when those turns are made, you know? And it didn't require a boycott and a public outcry and all sorts of other things. It was like, recognizing that the tide had turned and it was time to do the right thing.

What’s your favorite voice role that you’ve done?

It's so hard because they're all my babies and I have different favorites for different ones. My favorite recording experience was playing The Tin Man on Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz because we recorded it all together as a cast of 10 and spent every week together. That was amazing.

My favorite scripts that I got to read were Boss Baby, because I had massive chunks of dialogue and just speaking as a high-powered, jet-setting, corporate businessman as a baby. It was so bizarre and so well-written.

As far as impact, I think I've played characters that in my estimation were queer, but I've never been able to say that without getting in trouble with legal. But with Morph, it's an agreed upon fact that this is a nonbinary character and that for me is so exciting.

So I have a lot of favorites, but that's everything with me. Food too.

And what would be your dream voice role? Either a character or project that you desperately want to be involved in.

I've played a ton of legacy characters, that really is my career. I'd love to play some really fun and original characters, I love when I get to do that. But if I have a legacy character left over that I'd still love to play.

There's one left and it's Skeletor. He's my hero.

X-Men ‘97 is airing new episodes weekly on Disney+.