Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cast on Growing the Brothers Up and Apart for TV
Exclusive: The real adolescent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from Mutant Mayhem are back, but for their new TV series they’re being split up!
| | When Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem opened a year ago, it hit like a mutagen bomb. Despite our fab four characters of Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael being around for decades—this year marks their 40th(!) anniversary—never before had anyone really thought about treating them like… teenagers.
In the dizzyingly animated film, the characters were played by real adolescents like Nicolas Cantu (Leo), Micah Abbey (Donnie), Shamon Brown Jr. (Mikey), and Brady Noon (Raph). None of whom were old enough to vote when first stepping into the recording booth—a place where they recorded entirely together and in a style apropos of writers and producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The creatives who long favored spontaneity, and in this case the filmmakers wanted to catch the giggling authenticity of youth.
But you can’t be a kid forever, even if you’re a pizza-loving turtle in a half-shell. And in the first major continuation of Mutant Mayhem’s canon, our guys are going to have to grow up real quick.
When Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hits Paramount+ next month, longtime fans and TMNT newbies alike will be offered another novel situation for their favorite cowabunga guys: seeing them split up. The hook of the two-dimensional, hand-drawn animated series—which is reportedly going to be a “bridge” between Mutant Mayhem and a big screen sequel slated for 2026—is that the villainous Bishop (Alanna Ubach) will use her newfangled sci-fi tech to separate the brothers and place them on four parallel roads of adventure and testing. From the stills alone, this seems likely to include meta-riffs on classic TMNT lore like 1993’s live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.
It’s conceptually new ground for the Turtles, and one of the most exciting aspects of the series for Chris Yost, the executive producer and co-showrunner with a long and storied TMNT legacy, including by writing on 2003’s fan favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series. And when he and fellow co-showrunner Alan Wan, alongside the whole cast, entered the Den of Geek studio at San Diego Comic-Con, Yost seemed mischievously excited about the possibilities.
“You know we loved the chemistry of the guys, we loved everything about that movie, how it really pushed them being teenagers first and foremost,” Yost says with a twinkle in his eye. Then he adds with a knowing chuckle, “[So] we were like, ‘We should just instantly mess that up. Really give the people more of what they liked but not!’”
The Turtles veteran elaborates this is about creating a new dynamic for the characters, much as the film did before: “It was really how can we do something different, how can we challenge the Turtles in a way they’ve never been challenged before? And it was through Bishop, who actually splits up the kids and puts them in some insane situations.”
Indeed, while the show is still keeping many of its secrets close to the chest, the fact that most individual episodes are titled after only one of the brothers suggests every turtle will have their own customized journey. And according to the actors, this philosophy changed how they performed and related to their characters as well, because by design they were required to record their characters apart instead of being in the same room.
“We recorded these individually,” explains Donatello’s Micah Abbey. “So when I pulled up to the booth and my boys weren’t with me, I was like, ‘I’m kind of lost here. I don’t know what to do.’ So it helped me dig deeper into the character and kind of find the identity Donatello needs to be in this scenario. And I think I speak for all of us when I say we missed each other in the booth, and I think it kind of affected us in the way characters were portrayed—just to be kind of lonely and finding it by ourselves.”
Brady Noon, who returns to voice Raphael again, agrees with the challenge and opportunity that recording solo offered.
“I think it’s a good thing,” Noon says. “We have more time to ourselves and our own characters to work out some kinks that maybe we had. [It’s] really finding our own character within this tale. Everyone’s got their own tale, and everyone’s going through their own struggles. And eventually, we all come back together, of course. But yeah, for the time being it’s a growing moment, especially for Raph.”
While we know the characters will come back together—they’re slated to appear in a sequel movie!—we can expect them to have gone through a very different experience, right down to how the new series was made. Consider for example that Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a two-dimensional show. Wan, who also has experience working with TMNT as a co-director on the 2012-2017 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series and as a supervising director on 2018-2020’s Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, explained to us how they’re taking a page from Mutant Mayhem and refiguring what a hand-drawn TMNT adventure looks like.
Says Wan, “What’s in the movie didn’t follow a traditional CG approach. And we want to take on that and not take a traditional 2D approach. So if you look at a traditional action show, the lines are very polished. Everything is very pristine. But on our show, everything looks raw, it’s rough. It feels like punk rock. And we definitely want to embrace that.”
Punk rock turtles? They really do grow up so fast.
Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles debuts on Paramount+ on Aug. 9.