New York Comic Con happened recently, and among the many elaborate cosplay artists and celebrities, it is likely you caught a glimpse of Robert Franzese mulling around the stalls and exhibitions. If you don’t recognize the name, then you may know him better as the “Real Life Peter Griffin”, because not only has Franzese made a 10 year career of making appearances as the Family Guy character, but has also met numerous celebrities and taken over TikTok and other social media with the persona, which sees him not just looking like Seth McFarlane’s Homer Simpson-esqe creation but also do a pretty spot on vocal impersonation as well.
Hailing from New York himself, Robert Franzese has been appearing at New York Comic Con for almost a decade, entertaining other fans of the series and in the process becoming something of a celebrity himself. With almost 600k followers on his TikTok account, and over 3.5 million likes on his various short videos, probably his biggest achievement is getting a shout out from the Family Guy team himself, which can be found on the commentary tracks of an episode in the DVD release of Season 17.
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While many home releases of popular TV shows include commentaries about the making of certain episodes, behind the scenes details that were previously unknown, or just end up as a few of the actors and direct sitting in a room watching what the audience is watching and trying to sound interested about it, Family Guy decided to do a feature called Character Commentary. In this feature, you can hear the characters themselves watching and reacting to the on screen action, making it a pretty unique and hilarious experience as it is almost like getting two episodes for the price of one.
As you would expect, things get quite heated and family love gets frayed, and by the time this piece of commentary comes around there has already been some “disagreements” in the fictional commentary team that have led Lois to threated to quit the show and leave Peter, which causes show creator Seth McFarlane to join the commentary as himself to try and settle the situation. You can only imagine what all of this must look like in real life considering McFarlane voices most of the characters himself. In the final minute of the video, McFarlane tells his creations, “None of you are real. You are all TV characters voiced by me, Alex Borstein, Seth Green, and Mila Kunis.”
Peter clearly isn’t going to take this lying down and comes back with, “If I’m not real, then why does a fat nerd pretend to be me at every Comic-Con?” and MacFarlane responds, “Please, don’t mention him. It’ll only encourage him.”
And encouraged Franzese has been, having created a real life alter ego of Peter, which even includes him being available for hire on Cameo to deliver messages as “the Real Life Peter Griffin.” Well if celebrities can have impersonators why not cartoon characters? However, Franzese did have some worries that his activities might be getting a bit too involved and contacted the creators of Family Guy to ask if there was any chance what he was doing could lead to him being sued for copyright infringement, but the reply he received was a resounding, “We know what you do and we love it.”
Speaking to Ladbible, Franzese said of his mention in the DVD, “I never thought I’d be referenced on it. It’s Family Guy, if you’re not getting roasted – it’s like Weird Al Yankovic in music – you can’t be mad when he parodies your song. It’s like, that’s when you know you’ve made it.”
He went on to explain his initial worries about becoming Peter Griffin in real life, saying, “When I first started doing this, I didn’t know if I was going to get sued or not, so I went on IMDb and made a profile so that I could contact them, and I got as far as a representative from [producers] Fuzzy Door and I introduced myself, and she said ‘oh yeah, we’ve heard about you, we love what you’re doing, you’ve even come up in table reads about the possibility of doing a live episode.”
Well that would certainly be the end to a real life fairytale, but for now Franzese seems more than happy with lot as a Peter Griffin impersonator, and if you are at New York Comic Con this weekend, make sure you keep an eye out for him. This news first appeared at LADBible.
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