TMNT: Only One Original Actor Wore The Suit, Provided The Voice & Did The Martial Arts
The prospect of making a grounded "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" film sounds decidedly counterintuitive to the very concept of the franchise. Yet, that's exactly what director Steve Barron did with the Turtles' first-ever live-action film, and with flying colors no less. It's honestly kind of a miracle how real so much of Barron's 1990 "TMNT" movie feels. Yes, there are human-sized anthropomorphic turtles skateboarding and snacking on pizza in its sewers, yet the film's depiction of New York City is believably scuzzy and lived-in.
Then there are the four heroes in a half-shell themselves (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael), who are brought to life by incredibly textured and emotive animatronic suits designed by the magicians at Jim Henson's Creature Shop. Most importantly for a film with the word "Ninja" in the title, they're able to convincingly perform martial arts in action scenes that are far more exhilarating and visceral than the relatively weightless tussles in the Michael Bay-produced "TMNT" live-action reboot (in which the Turtles were CGI characters played by actors in motion-capture suits). Credit that to Brian Foreman, Leif Tilden, Josh Pais, and Michelan Sisti, the unsung champs who wore the Turtle suits in Barron's film.
"They flew me to London to Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and I was body casted from head to toe, every inch of me except for two straws in my nose," Pais recalled for The Hollywood Reporter's 2015 oral history about the making of the film. "It was super intense. They told us afterward that they kept us in that plaster longer than they needed to, just to see if we would freak out." As the only Turtle actor who both wore the suit and did their voice, Pais would use that discomfort to feed into his performance as the Turtles' most tempestuous member, Raphael.
Raphael is cool but rude
Raphael was always the Turtle I related to the most watching the 1990 "TMNT" growing up. He was angry at the world for reasons he didn't understand (and some that he did). His mistakes bothered him more than the other Turtles' did. He liked to freely visit the surface world without wanting to live there. Even in a group of outsiders, Raph was always the odd one out. I'm sure I wasn't alone in connecting to a superhero like that.
Having a single actor embody every aspect of the character probably only helped to make him more relatable. In addition to wearing the Turtle suit (with Kenn Troum serving as his stunt double) and doing the voice, Pais was also responsible for Raphael's facial expressions, which were operated by the puppeteer David Greenaway. "It was a very close relationship because he was basically watching what I would do in [the film's] rehearsals, and then seeing how we could make something similar animatronically with this turtle head," Pais told THR.
Between the scorching temperatures when "TMNT" began filming in the summer of 1989 and the discomfort of having to wear a 70-pound claustrophobic costume all day long, getting into character wasn't exactly hard for Pais. "The first thing we shot might have been when you first see the Turtles walking through the sewer and coming into where they live. Everything that could go wrong went wrong," Pais explained. "[...] Those frustrations helped me to really find a way to physicalize Raphael's anger — his fury. The whole situation, I just used it to create this guy."
'A Jose Canseco bat? Tell me you didn't pay money for this'
Raph's onery disposition wasn't the only aspect of the character Pais played a hands-on role in developing. "Raphael's New York accent was my decision. They went along with it," the actor told THR. This is also why, when it came time to cast the Turtles' voice actors, the "TMNT" creatives elected to stick with Pais' voice. "I think it was because [of] this physical way of moving, they just said it was so connected to the voice that we can't see anyone else doing it. I brought that to it. It wasn't in the script," he added. Truly, it's hard to imagine a separate actor matching Pais' flawless line delivery as Raph, especially in moments like the one where he ruefully trash-talks the human vigilante Casey Jones and his weapon of choice.
According to Pais, part of the reason his and his fellow Turtle suit actors' contributions to "TMNT" flew under the radar for so long was that the film's backers "really didn't want much publicity on who the Turtles were, because they didn't want to ruin the illusion." Admittedly, there may have been valid reason to be concerned about that. Pais learned that the hard way. In a story he recounted to THR, he recalled how, around the time of the film's release, he and Leif Tilden (the in-suit performer for Donatello) accidentally made a young "TMNT" fan cry by telling them they were the actors who played Raph and Donnie.
Thankfully, most adult "TMNT" enthusiasts today will probably respond a tad more gracefully to learning who the man was behind their favorite Turtle.