‘Gallons of tea and really tight pants’: Keegan-Michael Key on how he mimicked Toad’s shriek for Mario movie

Keegan-Michael Key has joked that “Earl Grey tea and really tight pants” were the secret to his Toad impression in The Super Mario Bros Movie.

The comedian joins a voice cast including Chris Pratt, Charlie Day and Anya Taylor-Joy in the animated remake of the classic Nintendo game, with Key voicing the high-pitched mushroom Toad.

During an appearance on The Tonight Show on Tuesday (4 April), host Jimmy Fallon asked Key how he made his voice sound “totally different” as Toad.

The comedian explained that he’d initially tried to impersonate a friend who likes to emphasise the wrong words in sentences.

“I went to the director and I started doing that, and the director was like, ‘That’s cool. I like that. Can you get the voice a little bit higher?’” Key recalled, before making his voice slightly higher and saying: “Yeah, yeah, sure, I can get it a little bit higher.

“He’s like, ‘Can you get it a little bit higher than that?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I can get it higher than that if you want me to get higher than that,’” Key said, lifting his voice once again.

“‘Can you get the voice even higher than that?’” he recalled the director saying, before putting on his highest voice and responding: “‘Yeah, sure, sure. We can get all the way up here if you want to get the voice up there.’”

“How, dude?” Fallon asked, with Key explaining: “And then I was just like, ‘Erm, maintaining it might be a different thing’... I had no idea I could do it. I just kept on going higher and higher.

“Then it’s just like, how are we going to maintain this? And I’m thinking, I don’t know. Just gallons of Earl Grey tea and really, really tight pants, I guess.”

You can read The Independent’s two-star review of The Super Mario Bros Movie here.