Who’s that cat? America’s favorite lasagna-loving feline, Garfield, is headed back to the small screen. And while details on the show so far are minimal, we do know the Emmy-winning New Girl star who will be following in the paw-steps of Bill Murray and Chris Pratt as the voice of Garfield.
Lamorne Morris (who is of no relation to similarly orange pitch-cat Morris the Cat) will voice Garfield in the new animated series, which is tentatively titled Garfield. Morris is best known for the long-running Fox sitcom New Girl. He played Winston Bishop, an enthusiast of terrible pranks, bird shirts, and, yes, cats; for most of the series’ run, he owned a cat named Furguson, who he doted on. He won an Emmy for his role on the fifth season of Fargo, and has also starred in the films Game Night, Jumanji: The Next Level, and Saturday Night, where he played Garrett Morris (also no relation). The new Garfield series will be produced in 2D animation, and is a production of Nickelodeon Studios; it will stream on Paramount+.
Who Is Garfield?
Created by Indiana cartoonist Jim Davis in his own eponymous cartoon strip in 1978, Garfield is an orange cat with a love of lasagna, a hatred of Mondays, and a practiced indifference to his owner, dorky cartoonist Jon Arbuckle. The strip soon became a sensation, and merchandise from Davis’ Paws Inc. was ubiquitous in the 1980s and 90s. The character first made his way into animation in the 1982 special Here Comes Garfield, in which he was voiced by Lorenzo Music; Music would continue to voice the character in more specials and the animated Garfield and Friends series until his 2001 death. Bill Murray took over the character in two live-action/animated hybrid movies, while voice acting legend Frank Welker voiced the cat in the CG-animated The Garfield Show. Most recently, Chris Pratt voiced Garfield in The Garfield Movie, a big-screen CG animated film; it grossed $267 million USD on a $60 million budget in 2024, and a sequel is reportedly in development.
The new Garfield series will be executive produced by Dave H. Johnson (Middlemost Post) and John Trabbic III (SpongeBob SquarePants). The development of the first Garfield animated series in over a decade was first announced back in 2019, when Paramount acquired Paws Inc.
A new Garfield animated series is in development for Paramount+.
via Collider