Hank Azaria: The Queens Kid Who Voiced Half of Springfield and Spent 30 Years Learning What That Actually Meant

 

Quick Facts	Details
Full Name	Henry Albert Azaria
Screen Name	Hank Azaria
Date of Birth	April 25, 1964
Birthplace	Forest Hills, Queens, New York City, USA
Age (2026)	61 years old
Height	5 ft 8 in (173 cm)
Nationality	American
Religion	Jewish (Sephardic)
Heritage	Sephardic Jewish — grandparents from Thessaloniki, Greece; family expelled from Spain 1492
Father	Albert Azaria — dress manufacturing businesses
Mother	Ruth Altcheck Azaria — stay-at-home mother
High School	The Kew-Forest School, Forest Hills, Queens
College	Tufts University — Drama (1981–1985); American Academy of Dramatic Arts
College connection	Met Oliver Platt at Tufts — The Merchant of Venice together
Early jobs	Bartender; stand-up comedian
Simpsons debut	Season 1 (1989); permanent cast Season 2 onward
Simpsons characters	Moe Szyslak; Apu Nahasapeemapetilon (1990–2020); Chief Wiggum; Comic Book Guy; Professor Frink; Snake Jailbird; Kirk Van Houten; Superintendent Chalmers; Disco Stu; Duffman; Bumblebee Man; Sea Captain; Cletus; Dr. Nick; Lou; Wiseguy; and many more
Simpsons salary	$400,000/episode (~$9M/year); previously $30,000/episode until negotiation
Moe voice	Based on Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon; made more “gravelly” by Groening and Simon
Emmy Awards	6 total — 4 Simpsons Voice-Over (1998, 2001, 2003, 2015); Tuesdays with Morrie (Supporting Actor Limited Series); Ray Donovan (Guest Actor Drama)
SAG Award	Outstanding Cast — The Birdcage (1996)
Tony nomination	Best Actor in a Musical — Spamalot (2005)
Key films	Pretty Woman (1990); Quiz Show (1994); Heat (1995); The Birdcage (1996); Godzilla (1998); Mystery Men (1999); Shattered Glass (2003); Along Came Polly (2004); Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009)
Key TV	Mad About You; Friends (David); Tuesdays with Morrie (1999); Huff (2004–2006); Ray Donovan; Brockmire (IFC, 2017–2020); The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel; The Artist (2025)
Stage	Spamalot (2005, Tony nom); The Seagull; Tuesdays with Morrie
Voice outside Simpsons	Venom — Spider-Man: The Animated Series; Bartok — Anastasia (1997); Happy Feet Two; Hop
Apu controversy	The Problem with Apu (2017); stepped away 2020; apologised April 2021 — Dax Shepherd podcast
Sobriety	Struggled with alcohol; credits late Matthew Perry with helping his recovery
EZ Street Band	Performs as Bruce Springsteen in tribute band
Honorary degree	Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters — Tufts University, 2016
Music video	Smash Mouth — “All Star” (brief appearance)
Wife 1	Helen Hunt (m. July 17, 1999; div. December 2000)
Wife 2	Katie Wright — married 2007
Son	Hal Azaria (b. 2009)
Net worth (2026)	$90 million

If you have watched The Simpsons at any point in the past thirty-five years — one of the most-watched television programmes in human history, broadcast in more than one hundred countries, whose cultural penetration across multiple generations makes it one of the few entertainment franchises whose specific phrases and images are understood as shorthand by people who have never met each other — you have heard Hank Azaria’s voice. Possibly a dozen times in a single episode.

Moe Szyslak, the bar owner whose specific combination of self-pity, misplaced aggression, and occasional unexpected vulnerability has made him one of the show’s most beloved characters. Chief Clancy Wiggum, the incompetent police chief whose slow-witted authority is the closest Springfield gets to civic order. Comic Book Guy, whose pompous pedantry and specific condescension toward anyone who challenges his expertise is the show’s most precise satire of a recognisable type. Professor Frink, whose manic scientific enthusiasm and impenetrable jargon are the register in which the show conducts its broadest comedic science parody. Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the Kwik-E-Mart proprietor — a character whose thirty-year history is the most complex and contested dimension of a career whose other dimensions are uniformly celebrated.

The list of characters Hank Azaria has voiced across more than thirty-five years of The Simpsons runs to more than a dozen recurring figures and dozens of one-off voices — the cumulative population of a vocal universe built in the specific space between the ears of a man from Forest Hills, Queens, who decided at sixteen that he wanted to be an actor and has been finding voices for other people’s characters ever since.

Hank Azaria is sixty-one years old. He has six Emmy Awards. He has a Tony nomination for a Monty Python musical. He performed as Bruce Springsteen in a tribute band. He bartended in Los Angeles while waiting for the auditions that changed his life. His son is named Hal. The Queens kid did well.

Forest Hills, Queens: The Sephardic Jewish Heritage

Henry Albert Azaria was born on April 25, 1964, in Forest Hills, Queens — the New York City neighbourhood whose specific demographic character in the mid-twentieth century, shaped by its large Jewish population and its position as a gateway community between Manhattan’s cultural world and the broader New York metropolitan area, gave him the formation of someone who grew up close to everything without being in the middle of it.

His heritage is Sephardic Jewish — one of the most historically resonant Jewish traditions in the world, and one whose specific American expression through the Forest Hills community reflects a multi-generational journey that began, by Azaria’s account, with his grandparents’ emigration from Thessaloniki, Greece. The Sephardic Jewish community of Thessaloniki was one of the largest and most culturally significant in Europe — its origins in the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, when the Ottoman Empire’s Sultan Bayezid II welcomed the expelled population into his territories, giving the community its specific combination of Spanish linguistic heritage (Ladino), Greek geographic rootedness, and the particular cultural synthesis of a community that had maintained its identity across five centuries of diaspora.

The Thessaloniki Jewish community was nearly entirely destroyed in the Holocaust — more than 96 percent of its population murdered in Auschwitz. The families who survived and emigrated, including Azaria’s grandparents, carried with them both the specific cultural heritage of that extraordinary community and the specific grief of its near-total destruction.

His father Albert Azaria built his professional identity in New York’s dress manufacturing businesses — the specific garment industry presence of the mid-twentieth century Jewish immigrant and second-generation community whose commercial concentration in that industry reflected both economic opportunity and cultural network. His mother Ruth Altcheck Azaria was a stay-at-home mother whose presence in the household gave the domestic life its specific warmth and continuity.

Forest Hills in the 1960s and 1970s was — among other things — the neighbourhood of West Side Tennis Club, whose Forest Hills Stadium hosted the US Open until 1978, and the neighbourhood of the apartment buildings and tree-lined streets that constituted the comfortable middle-class Jewish New York world from which a significant proportion of the American entertainment industry’s creative workforce emerged across that generation.

The Kew-Forest School, the School Play at Sixteen, and the Decision

The Kew-Forest School — the private school in Forest Hills whose alumni include, by one of the more striking biographical coincidences in American educational history, both Hank Azaria and Donald Trump (who attended decades earlier) — was where Azaria received the specific education of a private school student in Queens whose intellectual formation preceded his artistic one.

The school play at sixteen was the biographical turning point whose simplicity belies its consequence: the experience of performing in front of an audience, of inhabiting a character and discovering that the audience’s engagement with that character was something he could feel and respond to in real time, produced the specific conviction that this was what he wanted to do with his professional life. The decision, made at sixteen in a private school in Queens, has sustained itself through thirty-five years of career with a consistency that the most important professional decisions tend to demonstrate.

He was already developing the specific talent whose professional expression The Simpsons would eventually provide: an extraordinary gift for voices and impressions — the ability to hear a specific quality in a voice, identify what makes it distinctive, and reproduce it with the precision that distinguishes a genuine impressionist from a competent mimic.

Tufts University, Oliver Platt, and the Years Before the Auditions

From The Kew-Forest School, Azaria enrolled at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts — studying Drama from 1981 to 1985, the four-year formation in the specific craft of theatrical performance that preceded his professional career. He also trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, adding the institutional depth of one of American theatre’s oldest training institutions to the university foundation.

At Tufts, he met Oliver Platt — the actor whose subsequent career, across films including A Time to Kill, Bicentennial Man, Casanova, 2012, X-Men: First Class, and Chicago Med, has been one of the steadiest and most respected character actor careers of his generation. They appeared together in a Tufts production of The Merchant of Venice — the beginning of a friendship whose professional proximity would eventually place them in the same productions and the same industry conversations across the following four decades.

After Tufts and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Azaria made the standard journey of the New York-trained actor building a West Coast career: he moved to Los Angeles, where the television industry’s concentration made it the natural destination for a young actor whose performing instincts and vocal capabilities were better suited to the screen’s specific demands than to the stage-centric New York theatre world.

He worked as a bartender to pay the bills — the specific day job of a Los Angeles actor whose auditions were not yet producing the income the rent required. He also did stand-up comedy, developing the comedic timing and the audience awareness that the voice acting career would subsequently deploy in different but related forms. The stand-up years were not a primary career aspiration but a professional development exercise — the specific training in how to be funny in real time, in front of people who are watching you, without the safety net of a written script.

The Simpsons From 1989: Building Springfield One Voice at a Time

Hank Azaria joined The Simpsons in 1989 — the year of the show’s debut season, when it was still unclear whether the animated spin-off from The Tracey Ullman Show would find a mainstream audience or remain the cult property that its unconventional aesthetic suggested. His first character was Moe Szyslak — the bar owner, Homer Simpson’s primary social outlet, whose voice Azaria built from a specific and characteristic source.

The Moe voice is based on Al Pacino’s performance in Dog Day Afternoon — the 1975 Sidney Lumet film in which Pacino played a desperate bank robber whose specific combination of street credibility, emotional volatility, and the particular rhythm of working-class New York speech gave the voice its foundational quality. Matt Groening and Sam Simon subsequently asked Azaria to make it more “gravelly” — the specific modification that produced the specific Moe Szyslak sound that thirty-five years of audience familiarity has made one of the most recognisable voices in American animated television.

Chief Wiggum’s voice was based on Edward G. Robinson — the classic Hollywood gangster actor whose specific nasal quality and the particular clipped energy of his delivery gave Wiggum the comic authority of someone whose incompetence is delivered with the confidence of genuine menace.

The full roster of characters that Azaria has voiced across The Simpsons‘ run is one of the more extraordinary catalogues of vocal performance in American entertainment: Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, Comic Book Guy, Professor Frink, Snake Jailbird, Kirk Van Houten, Superintendent Chalmers, Disco Stu, Duffman, Bumblebee Man, Sea Captain, Cletus Spuckler, Dr. Nick Riviera, Lou, Carl Carlson (until Season 32), Wiseguy — each a distinct vocal identity whose consistency across hundreds of episodes reflects the specific technical discipline that maintaining a large roster of recurring characters across decades requires.

The financial dimension of his Simpsons tenure reflects the show’s extraordinary commercial success and the industry’s eventual recognition of its voice cast’s value. His initial salary was approximately $30,000 per episode — modest by the standards of a primetime network show’s lead voice cast, but substantial by the standards of animation at the time. In 2004, the six main voice actors — including Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, and Harry Shearer alongside Azaria — negotiated collectively as a group, securing a significant increase that reflected the show’s unprecedented cultural and commercial success. His current per-episode rate is reported at approximately $400,000 — the equivalent of approximately $9 million per year at the pace of a full season.

The Film Career: From Pretty Woman to The Birdcage

The film career that Hank Azaria built alongside The Simpsons demonstrated the specific range that the voice work alone could not fully document — the physical comic range, the character actor versatility, the specific capability of a performer whose instinct for the comedic register could be deployed in front of a camera rather than behind a microphone.

His film debut came in Pretty Woman (1990) — a minor role as a hotel manager in the film that made Julia Roberts a global star, whose specific function in Azaria’s career was providing a first film credit rather than a showcase for his capabilities.

Quiz Show (1994) — Robert Redford’s examination of the 1950s television quiz show scandals — placed him in a serious dramatic ensemble alongside Ralph Fiennes, John Turturro, and Rob Morrow, demonstrating that the comedic reputation developing through The Simpsons was not his only register.

Heat (1995) — Michael Mann’s masterwork of Los Angeles crime, starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro — cast him as Alan Marciano, a small but memorable supporting role in one of the decade’s most significant films. The casting placed him in a film whose director and star cast had both been, in different ways, the inspirations for the specific voice he was simultaneously deploying across Springfield.

The Birdcage (1996) — Mike Nichols’s American remake of La Cage aux Folles, starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane — gave him his most complete film comic performance of the decade: Agador Spartacus, the Guatemalan houseboy whose combination of physical comedy, comic timing, and the specific energy of someone whose persona is entirely constructed and entirely genuine simultaneously gave him the showcase that the ensemble films around him had not provided. The film won the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast, placing him among the most celebrated ensemble of the year.

Shattered Glass (2003) — Billy Ray’s account of journalist Stephen Glass’s fabrications at The New Republic — cast him as Chuck Lane, the editor who uncovers the fraud, in a dramatic performance of sustained authority that demonstrated the full range of a performer whose comedic reputation had tended to obscure what he could do in a dramatically serious context.

Television Outside The Simpsons: David, Morrie, Huff, and Brockmire

The television career that ran alongside The Simpsons produced the sustained dramatic and comedic work that the weekly animated commitment could not contain.

On Mad About You — the NBC sitcom starring Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser as a married couple in New York — Azaria was a recurring presence as Paul’s friend, whose specific social world the show’s domestic comedy regularly expanded into. The show’s production was also where he met the woman he would eventually marry.

On Friends — whose specific status as one of the most-watched sitcoms in American television history makes every recurring guest role a biographical credential — he played David, the scientist and Phoebe’s love interest, the man who went to Minsk for a research position and whose periodic returns to New York and Phoebe’s orbit produced some of the show’s most consistently affecting secondary storylines. The character’s specific combination of romantic sincerity and professional absurdity — a genuinely good man whose professional life had taken him to Minsk — suited Azaria’s specific capabilities for comedic warmth.

Tuesdays with Morrie (1999) — the ABC television film based on Mitch Albom’s bestselling memoir about his visits to his dying professor Morrie Schwartz — cast him as Mitch Albom opposite Jack Lemmon’s Morrie. The performance earned him the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie — the first non-Simpsons Emmy of his career, and the formal acknowledgement that his dramatic range extended to the specific demands of emotionally sustained biographical television.

Huff (Showtime, 2004–2006) — the critically praised cable drama in which he played Craig “Huff” Huffstodt, a psychiatrist whose professional and personal life begin simultaneously unravelling after a patient’s suicide in his office — was the most sustained dramatic performance of his television career: the two-season lead of a complex, character-driven cable drama whose quality the Golden Globe nominations the role generated confirmed. The show is among the most underremembered prestige cable dramas of its era; his performance in it is among the least adequately recognised of his career.

Brockmire (IFC, 2017–2020) — which began as a Funny or Die web sketch that Azaria developed and starred in before it was adapted into a four-season IFC comedy series — gave him the most complete vehicle for his comedic capabilities outside The Simpsons: Jim Brockmire, a baseball play-by-play announcer whose very public on-air breakdown — he discovered his wife’s infidelity mid-broadcast and described it with excruciating precision over the stadium microphone — sent him into a decade of self-destruction from which the series follows his attempted recovery. The show received a Peabody Award. Azaria received multiple nominations for his performance and served as a producer, giving him the creative ownership that the Simpsons ensemble structure had never provided.

Spamalot, Broadway, and the Stage Career

Hank Azaria’s relationship with the stage is the dimension of his career that his television reputation tends to obscure but that he has consistently described as a first love. The specific discipline of live performance — the sustained presence, the real-time calibration, the specific vulnerability of a theatrical commitment whose consequences cannot be edited in post — is the form that trained him and to which he has periodically returned throughout a career whose screen work has been its commercial foundation.

Spamalot (2005) — Mike Nichols’s Broadway adaptation of Monty Python’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail — cast him as Sir Lancelot, the knight whose specific combination of valour and comic self-importance gave Azaria the specific theatrical register that his Simpsons work had been conducting in abbreviated form across sixteen years. The performance earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical — the formal theatrical recognition of a screen actor whose stage work was of sufficient quality to compete in a category whose standards are those of the primary theatrical form rather than the television or film world from which he had arrived.

He has appeared in other Broadway productions — including The Seagull — with the specific seriousness of someone who approaches stage work not as a celebrity appearance but as a genuine professional obligation.

The Apu Apology: The Thirty-Year Reckoning

Apu Nahasapeemapetilon — the proprietor of the Kwik-E-Mart, introduced in 1990 — was, for thirty years, one of The Simpsons’ most beloved secondary characters and one of its most popular. He was also, as Hari Kondabolu’s 2017 documentary The Problem with Apu made the broader cultural conversation understand with clarity and force, a character whose specific construction — a generic “Indian accent” voiced by a white actor, whose characterisation as a convenience store owner drew on stereotypes that had been damaging to South Asian Americans in the specific ways that sustained media representation of a group through caricature tends to damage them — had caused real harm to real people.

The documentary’s argument was not that Apu was maliciously constructed — Kondabolu is explicit about the affection and the complexity of his own relationship to the character. The argument was that the character’s specific form of representation, however warmly intended, had provided a vocabulary of mockery that the children who grew up watching it could not escape.

The Simpsons’ initial response — a Season 29 episode in which Marge breaks the fourth wall and Lisa looks directly at the camera and says “What do you want me to say?” — was widely perceived as dismissive: the show’s creative leadership deflecting rather than engaging with a substantive criticism of their creation.

Azaria’s response evolved differently. He initially described the controversy as complex and difficult. He began listening more carefully to the people whose experience of the character was the basis of the critique. In early 2020, he stepped away from voicing Apu — the character effectively retiring from the show without a formal announcement. In April 2021, on Dax Shepherd’s Armchair Expert podcast, he formally apologised.

The apology was not a corporate statement. He described having reached out personally to members of the South Asian American community, including people who had appeared in Kondabolu’s documentary, and having sat with what they told him about what the character had meant in their lives. “I’ve realized that, at the very least, it was making South Asian people feel marginalized and I should have known better,” he said. “It just meant so much to them — the fact that I cared meant so much to them. And I wanted to say I was sorry to them.”

The specific quality of the apology — personal, sustained, resulting from actual conversations with the people who had been affected rather than from a publicist’s crisis management instinct — is what distinguished it from the standard celebrity apology whose primary function is reputation management. It was, by the account of some of the South Asian Americans he spoke with, what an apology is supposed to be.

Matthew Perry, Sobriety, and the Support That Came From a Friend

Hank Azaria has been open, across multiple interviews, about his struggles with alcohol — the specific dimension of his personal life whose difficulty he has chosen to discuss publicly rather than manage through the standard entertainment industry practice of treating substance dependency as something to be kept private until it cannot be any longer.

He has credited the late Matthew Perry — who died on October 28, 2023, and whose own sustained and public advocacy for sobriety was one of the most significant dimensions of his public identity in the final decade of his life — with having helped him on his path to recovery. Perry’s specific approach to sobriety — the combination of genuine personal commitment and the willingness to use his platform to advocate for others — was the specific form of support that Azaria found meaningful.

His tribute to Perry following his death reflected the specific depth of a friendship whose substance the professional proximity of two actors in the same industry world had allowed to develop into something more sustaining than professional acquaintance.

Helen Hunt, Katie Wright, Son Hal, and the EZ Street Band

Hank Azaria met Helen Hunt — the actress whose Mad About You lead role and subsequent Academy Award for As Good as It Gets (1997) made her one of the most prominent American actresses of the 1990s — through his recurring role on her show. They married on July 17, 1999. The marriage lasted less than two years, finalised in December 2000 — the specific brevity of a relationship whose genuine connection could not sustain the specific pressures of two high-profile careers in close professional proximity.

He had previously been in a relationship with Julie Warner — the actress — in the early 1990s, and had experienced the specific difficulty of romantic relationships in the entertainment industry’s ecosystem before the Hunt marriage made it more public.

He married Katie Wright — a private actress — in 2007. Their son Hal Azaria was born in 2009, when Hank was forty-four. He has described fatherhood with the specific gravity and gratitude of someone who came to it later than the standard trajectory and understood, from the beginning, that it was the most significant thing he would do.

Alongside the professional life, the sobriety, and the fatherhood — he performs as Bruce Springsteen in The EZ Street Band, a tribute act whose name references Springsteen’s E Street Band. The Springsteen devotion is genuine and sustained, the specific enthusiastic fandom of a Sephardic Jewish kid from Forest Hills who found in Springsteen’s music about working-class New Jersey the specific emotional truth that resonated across the Hudson. He also appeared briefly in the Smash Mouth “All Star” music video — a biographical cameo in the most improbable possible pop cultural document.

Net Worth: The $90 Million Accounting

Income Source	Estimated Contribution
The Simpsons (1989–present, 35+ seasons)	~$9M/year at peak; lifetime accumulated primary income
Film — The Birdcage (SAG); Heat; Shattered Glass; others	Cumulative film fees
Tuesdays with Morrie — Emmy; ABC TV film	TV movie fee
Huff (Showtime, 2004–2006, lead)	Cable drama lead fees; Golden Globe recognised
Ray Donovan — Emmy; Showtime recurring	Cable drama fees
Brockmire (IFC, 2017–2020, lead + EP)	Cable lead + producing fees; Peabody Award show
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel recurring	Amazon streaming fee
Broadway — Spamalot (Tony nominated)	Theatre fees
Voice work — Anastasia (Annie nom); Spider-Man (Venom)	Animation fees
Real estate — Meg Ryan sale ($8M); NY properties	Significant property appreciation
Estimated Total Net Worth (2026)	$90 million

Conclusion

Hank Azaria was born in Forest Hills, Queens, on April 25, 1964, the son of a dress manufacturer and the grandson of Sephardic Jews from Thessaloniki whose family had been making the journey from one world to another since the Spanish Inquisition. He decided to become an actor at sixteen at a school whose other famous alumnus is a real estate developer who became a president. He studied drama at Tufts, met Oliver Platt in a production of The Merchant of Venice, moved to Los Angeles, tended bar, auditioned, and joined The Simpsons at twenty-five as a man named Moe whose voice was built from an Al Pacino performance in a 1975 bank robbery film.

Thirty-five years later he is still Moe. And Chief Wiggum. And Professor Frink. And Comic Book Guy. And Duffman. He won six Emmy Awards. He was in The Birdcage and Heat and Shattered Glass and Brockmire. He was nominated for a Tony for a Monty Python musical. He married Helen Hunt and then someone else and had a son named Hal at forty-four. He was helped in his sobriety by Matthew Perry. He apologised for Apu — properly, personally, in the specific way that apologies are supposed to work. He performs as Bruce Springsteen on weekends. He appeared briefly in the “All Star” video.

The Queens kid did good. And he spent thirty years figuring out what good actually meant — which is, in its own way, the more interesting story.

FAQs

1. How many Emmy Awards does Hank Azaria have? Hank Azaria has 6 Emmy Awards — four for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance for The Simpsons (1998, 2001, 2003, 2015), one for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for Tuesdays with Morrie (1999), and one for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for Ray Donovan.

2. Why did Hank Azaria stop voicing Apu? Azaria stepped away from voicing Apu Nahasapeemapetilon in early 2020, following the debate sparked by Hari Kondabolu’s 2017 documentary The Problem with Apu, which argued the character perpetuated harmful stereotypes of South Asian Americans. In April 2021, on Dax Shepherd’s podcast, Azaria formally apologised after reaching out personally to South Asian Americans affected by the character’s portrayal.

3. What is Hank Azaria’s net worth in 2026? Hank Azaria’s estimated net worth in 2026 is approximately $90 million, accumulated primarily through his decades-long salary of up to $400,000 per episode on The Simpsons, alongside significant film and television roles, Broadway performances, and real estate.

4. Who is Hank Azaria married to? Hank Azaria is married to Katie Wright — they married in 2007 and have a son, Hal Azaria, born in 2009. He was previously married to Helen Hunt (July 1999 – December 2000), whom he met during his recurring role on Mad About You.

5. What is Hank Azaria’s connection to Matthew Perry? Hank Azaria has spoken openly about his struggles with alcohol and has credited the late Matthew Perry — who died in October 2023 — with having helped him on his path to sobriety. Perry was himself a prominent advocate for addiction recovery and helped many people in the entertainment industry through his own experience.

6. What characters does Hank Azaria voice on The Simpsons? Hank Azaria voices more than a dozen recurring characters on The Simpsons, including Moe Szyslak, Chief Wiggum, Comic Book Guy, Professor Frink, Snake Jailbird, Superintendent Chalmers, Kirk Van Houten, Disco Stu, Duffman, Bumblebee Man, Sea Captain, Cletus Spuckler, Dr. Nick Riviera, and Wiseguy, among many others. He voiced Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from 1990 until 2020.