Matthew Yang King is an American actor. He is most known for recurring roles on Riverdale, Powers, 24, Strong Medicine, and Numbers. He created the webseries World of Steam and has provided voiceover work for numerous television shows, video games, and commercials including Netflix's new Emmy award winning Love, Death & Robots, Studio Ghibli's 25th Anniversary English dub of Only Yesterday with Daisy Ridley, the World of Warcraft franchise, ,, Fortnite, Supah Ninjas, and Marvel Heroes.
Early and personal life
King was born in New York, New York. At age five he began to play the violin, a skill that would lead to later roles on both stage and screen. At the age of eight, he began studying Aikido, which fostered a lifelong love of martial arts. He moved to Stamford, Connecticut at age one and later moved to Hartford where he attended Hall High School, but returned to his home town of New York after graduating high school. King studied Acting at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and lived in New York until 1998, when he left to tour the United States with the musical Titanic, playing Quartermaster Robert Hichens and Bandsman Bricoux. The tour began in Los Angeles, where King moved after leaving the tour in 2000. He continues to live there with his wife and three children.
Career
Voice acting
King has provided numerous iconic voices for both television and film animation and video games, from the voice of the Host in the Emmy Award winning episodes 'The Witness' and Liang and Renshu in 'Good Hunting.' His work ranges from the Father and Kozou in Studio Ghibli's Only Yesterday to Illidan Stormrage in the World of Warcraft francise, from The Persuader in Bruce Timm'sJustice League vs The Fatal Five to The Atom in Injustice 2, and from the voice of Eian in Batman Ninja to the voices of Splinter and Shredder in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. King is the voice of Apple in numerous television ads and also voiced both Liu Kang and Fujin in Mortal Kombat 11 Additionally, King was one of the creators and hosts of the long-running podcast, GeeksOn, with Aaron Hendricks, Donald Marshall, and Peter Gamble Robinson.
Film and television
King is most well known for his recurring roles on Riverdale, Numbers, 24, and Strong Medicine. His best-known film role is starring opposite Danny Huston in the Bernard Rose film, The Kreutzer Sonata, which also features King playing the violin.
Frustrated with playing stereotypically Asian roles in the early-mid 2000s, King began writing to create roles for minority actors "that people felt they could wrap their brains around that were about being ethnic... racism." The Harrowing, his script with Peter Gamble featuring an African-American man as the lead in a horror film, won numerous awards and is still in development.
Crowdfunding projects
In 2017, King collaborated with cartoonist Tarol Hunt and fellow producers Phil LaMarr and Danielle Stephens to bring Hunt's webcomic, Goblins, to life as an animated series. The Goblins Animated campaign on Indiegogo was to produce a five-minute long mega-trailer/pilot that could be used to garner more interest in the project. King himself voices one of the characters, Fumbles. Notable voice actors make up the rest of the cast, including Phil LaMarr as Complains of Names, Billy West as Minmax, Maurice LaMarche as Forgath, Jim Cummings as Thaco, Tara Strong as Saves a Fox, Matthew Mercer as Big Ears, Jennifer Hale as Kin, and Steve Blum as Kore. The mega-trailer is currently under production. In 2012, King created a Kickstarter project for his steampunk webseries called The World of Steam. Written, directed, and produced by King, the show is set in a Twilight Zone-type steampunk universe and featured Scott Folsom, Gail Folsom, Gina Torres, Mido Hamada, Karl E. Landler, Julian Curtis, Robin Atkin Downes, and King himself as the host, Mr. Liang. At the time, the series was the highest-grossing webseries ever on Kickstarter. The first episode, The Clockwork Heart, was released as a webisode in 2013 and contains music by composer Bear McCreary. The remainder of the series is still in the works and is being developed for television.
After the creation of the World of Steam webseries in 2012, King was seen as a leader in the Steampunk creative community. As a result, he was invited to serve as one of the three judges on the first-ever network Steampunk-themed reality show, Game Show Network'sSteampunk'd in 2015. King cites his Steampunk influces as H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, H.P. Lovecraft, K.W. Jeter, Robert Howard, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and China Mieville, among others. He collaborated with Scott and Gail Folsom from the League of STEAM on the pilot episode for the World of Steam, "The Clockwork Heart," and was cited in the 2016 book, Like Clockwork: Steampunk Pasts, Presents, and Futures, edited by Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall. His Love, Death and Robots episode, "Good Hunting," is Asian-inspired Steampunk. King has appeared at various Steampunk conventions as a presenter and judge, and is currently collaborating with Cheyenne Wright of Girl Genius on a new Steampunk project called The Cabinet of Curiosities.
