Tom Kenny & Bill Fagerbakke: Meet The Men Behind SpongeBob SquarePants & Patrick!

For over 15 years, Tom Kenny & Bill Fagerbakke have been responsible for bringing two lovable characters to life – SpongeBob SquarePants & Patrick Star.

Most actors who spend that long on a wildly successful show can’t go out in public without being hounded by fans – but Tom and Bill catch a bit of a break in that department.

“If you’re a giant star that’s on every TV screen, billboard and bus the way the SpongeBob movie is right now you’d just have every knucklehead and his brother coming up to you, [paparazzi] chasing you through the airport,” Tom – who voices SpongeBob — told Access Hollywood. “We don’t have to deal with any of that.”

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“The anonymity that’s part and parcel of voice overs is delicious,” Bill – who lends his voice to SpongeBob’s lovable sidekick Patrick — told us. “Some people recognize you but it’s never hysterical.”

For Tom, work as a voice actor was always the dream.

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“That’s always the job I wanted to have as a kid was to be Mel Blanc in cartoons,” he said. “He was the voice of almost everything when I was a kid.”

By all measures, Tom is now living his dream.

“I’m usually on 8 or 9 animated shows at a time,” he told Access Hollywood.

“You go to Nickelodeon and do SpongeBob or another Nicktoon or you go to Cartoon Network and do something else, then you’ll go to another place and do something that’s maybe more NC-17 rated like MTV or Adult Swim or something like that,” Tom said. “Then interspersed throughout that is just boring commercial stuff that’s fun in its own way. And nobody puts it together that that’s the SpongeBob guy.”

“This is a portrait of versatility here before you,” Bill joked describing Tom.

And no surprise, the legend of SpongeBob continues to grow – the movie claimed the top spot at the box office in its opening weekend, bringing in $56 million in North America.

— Courtney Cox

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