As Lemongrab became more prominent on the show, things got worse for Justin Roiland’s pipes to the point where it began affecting his other work, as he spoke about in the Vanity Fair interview:
“By the third episode there was so much of Lemongrab, there were a bunch of clones of him, and I was doing all of them and they all screamed. And I was in the booth for about three hours. And after that I went back to the ‘Rick and Morty’ writers’ room and I remember that we were talking about something and I tried to do Morty’s voice and I couldn’t do his voice. It just wouldn’t happen.”
For a voice actor with multiple jobs, having one of your characters render you unable to voice the rest of them just isn’t good business. Luckily, Roiland received some sage medical advice from veteran voice actor Tom Kenny, known for his work on “SpongeBob SquarePants” and basically every other cartoon you could think of. If anybody had experienced this issue before, it was Kenny.
“And then Tom Kenny told me […] ‘You need to go to this doctor.’ I went to see this doctor and he was like ‘Okay, yeah. You don’t have any vocal nodules but your vocal cords are super, super swollen. You need to not talk for like two weeks. And here’s a cortisone shot.”
Obviously, not being able to speak is a big obstacle for a voice actor, but it’s still not quite as bad as permanently damaging your vocal cords. So Roiland, a man known for being loud, was forced to take a vow of silence for two weeks.