'Rick and Morty' Season 4 guest stars: Here's who voices each new character

Rick and Morty Season 4 has quite a few surprises in store for fans, chief among them an exciting number of guest stars, some of which we don’t even know about until new episodes air. While the Kanye West episode won’t happen until Season 5 at the earliest, there’s still plenty more to get excited about through this season from Elon Musk to the return of Keegan-Michael Key. Still to come is some kind of character voiced by Paul Giamatti.

Throughout the first three seasons, Rick and Morty has had many high-profile guest stars like Nathan Fillion, John Oliver, Werner Herzog, and others. Season 4 has already seen new characters voiced by the likes of Liam Cunningham, Matthew Broderick, Taika Waititi, and Sam Neill, with more to come in future episodes.

Here’s an in-depth look at all the confirmed high-profile guest stars in Rick and Morty Season 4 that we know about, along with whatever information we have about who they are voicing in the new season:

Keegan-Michael Key — Shleemypants

In “Rattlestar Ricklactica,” Morty kills a space snake that bites him, destroying hope for an entire race of sentient snakes on the brink of a global race war. After he replaces the astronaut snake with a regular Earth snake, it creates a Terminator situation where snakes from the future send Terminators back in time to kill Morty. This creates all sorts of issues in the timeline, and Rick’s only solution is to overwrite the timeline by giving the snakes access to time travel earlier in their timeline.

That in turn attracts the attention of the 4th Dimensional Time Cops originally featured in the Season 2 premiere “A Rickle in Time,” specifically the “testicle monster” Shleemypants voiced by Keegan-Michael Key.

Matthew Broderick — Unnamed Talking Cat

During a SDCC interview with Kevin Smith for IMDb, Harmon and Roiland confirmed that Matthew Broderick was lending his voice to the show in Season 4, but they didn’t offer any specific details. Broderick voiced the unnamed talking cat in “Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim’s Morty,” the fourth episode of Season 4.

While Morty gets a dragon and deals with the fallout of that with help from Rick and Summer, Jerry encounters a mysterious talking cat who requests Jerry fly him to Florida first class. Why Florida? “Because they don’t ask questions,” the cat says. “They play volleyball, they party, and they have fun.”

We later learn that this talking cat is hiding something deeply traumatic in his past, and he’s ashamed of whatever he did to gain the ability to speak. Read more about what this character could mean to the series.

In the episode’s post-credits scene, the cat befriends Morty’s abandoned dragon, so there’s every possibility that these two could show up again.

Liam Cunningham — Balthromaw

The man who played Ser Davos Seawoth, aka the Onion Knight, in Game of Thrones, made his way into Rick and Morty for Season 4, Episode 4 as a red dragon named Balthromaw. Rick and Morty co-creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland confirmed actor Liam Cunningham for Season 4 during San Diego Comic Con in July 2019.

In his episode, Rick promises Morty a dragon if he helps out on a deadly mission. Despite a lot of complaining from Rick, Beth compels her father to make good on the promise. Rick purchases a dragon from a wizard of Dragonarchy, but after the dragon soul bonds with Rick instead, the wizards takes the dragon back, chastising it as a “slut.” That leaves Rick, Morty, and Summer to infiltrate the magical realm in the hopes of rescuing the dragon.

Cunningham moved from one magical fantasy story to another, and using his thick Irish accent to voice a dragon is reminiscent of Sean Connery voicing a dragon in Dragonheart. This feels deliberate as the episode pokes fun at fantasy movies just like that on, along with Game of Thrones and Dungeons & Dragons in general.

Elon Musk — Elon Tusk

After Rick’s Heistotron robot tries to take over the universe via a convoluted heist plot in Season 4’s third episode, Rick assembles a random team of people from across the multiverse. One of them is “Elon Tusk,” an alt-reality Elon Musk from a universe where all the humans seem to have tusks.

Billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk, has a long and storied history as a fan of Rick and Morty, and his appearance in “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty” is the culmination of almost three years worth of speculation and mystery.

The real Musk first tweeted his love for Rick and Morty in 2017 and met the show’s creators a few months later. He then wore a Rick and Morty shirt during a 2018 Tesla shareholder meeting. In February 2019, he co-hosted PewDiePie’s “Meme Review” with Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland, leading many to believe that a cameo on the show felt inevitable. In May, Roiland accidentally teased that he recorded something with Musk, and now we know it was this extended cameo on the show that he must have recorded around the time that they did “Meme Review.”

Justin Theroux — Miles Knightley

Season 4, Episode 3, “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty” opens with Rick and Morty raiding an ancient tomb full of boobytraps to retrieve some kind of treasure, except someone has beaten them to the prize. Rick recognizes a paper crane as the signature move of Miles Knightley, a pompous pink-skinned heist artist who runs Heist Con, a convention for people really into heists, whether as a fan or a professional. He’s the antagonist for the first half of the episode before Rick’s Heistotron robot starts heisting the whole universe.

Knightley is voiced by Justin Theroux, former husband to Friends and The Morning Show star Jennifer Aniston. He’s best-recognized as the star of The Leftovers on HBO, but he’s had plenty of voice-acting roles. He had a role in the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. He also voiced a Decepticon in the Bumblebee Transformers movie, and he voices Tramp in Disney+’s live-action Lady and the Tramp.

Jeffrey Wright — Tony

One of the more surprising additions to Rick and Morty’s second episode in Season 4 came with actor Jeffrey Wright voicing Tony, the alien who somehow managed to poop in Rick’s secret toilet on a remote, serene oasis. Rick spends the first half of the episode tracking Tony down based on very little evidence, and despite plans to kill Tony, Rick winds up sparing him — only to learn later that Tony died in a freak accident.

Tony is calm and depressed yet confident enough to stand up to Rick, saying that they’ll become fast friends even when Rick constantly threatens to kill him.

Wright is perhaps best-recognized as Bernard Lowe on Westworld, but he also has a role in the upcoming Batman movie as Commissioner Gordon. He’ll provide the voice for The Watcher in Marvel Studios’ upcoming Disney+ series What If…?.

Taika Waititi — Glootie

Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi — who also provides the voice and motion capture for Thor’s rocky friend Korg in the MCU and IG-11 on The Mandalorian — was confirmed for Season 4 with a clip shown during San Diego Comic-Con that debuted his alien character Glootie, a plump little alien who desperately wants to develop an app. He’s pink, has four eyes, white claws, and a tattoo stamped on his forehead that reads “DO NOT DEVELOP MY APP.” (In one SDCC interview, Justin Roiland confirmed it was Rick Sanchez who tattooed this.)

In Episode 2, “The Old Man and the Seat,” Glootie appears as Rick’s intern. He coerces Jerry into developing a dating app for humans on Earth, but it’s revealed to be a way for the Mogonotron mothership to steal Earth’s water. Glootie has a change of heart in the end and helps Morty and Rick take the app down.

Sam Neill — Monogotron Leader

As much as we’d all love for Sam Neill to reprise his iconic Jurassic Park role on Rick and Morty, he voices the leader of the Monogotrons in Episode 2.

“He’s from the same species as Taika’s character,” Roiland said of Neill’s role in a July 2019 Entertainment Weekly interview, “and we wanted a Kiwi flavor to their species.” That’s definitely the case for Glootie and the other intern we hear speak in the episode, but Neill’s accent sounds more natural and less Kiwi. Interestingly enough, Taika Waititi directed Sam Neill in the live-action Hunt for the Wilderpeople film.

Kathleen Turner — Monogotron Queen

Kathleen Turner has wielded her sultry voice in iconic roles like the animated Jessica Rabbit since 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but she’s also voiced characters on series like Family Guy or King of the Hill. She’s also had many live-action roles.

Her Rick and Morty character appears midway through Episode 2. She’s the romantic partner to Sam Neill’s Monogotron leader, so you might as well call her the queen. The two are affectionate and seem devoted to one another for several minutes of screentime, but once Glootie successfully sabotages the Lovefinderrz app on Earth, these two lovebirds get in a hilarious shouting match that involves her calling him a “childish prick” among many other excellent insults.

Paul Giamatti — ??

Rick and Morty co-creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland confirmed in May that while John Lithgow passed on a role, Paul Giamatti was cast in Season 4. Was it for the same role? Or was he just rattling off names that were considered?

During an interview with IMDb held at SDCC, Roiland referred to Giamatti’s story as part of the “crazy train episode,” which wasn’t part of the first five episodes in Season 4.

This detail has us wishing that Rick and Morty Season 4 might riff on Snowpiercer in some way, but a “crazy” train could mean just about anything.

The rest of Rick and Morty Season 4 will air sometime in 2020.