R.I.P. Johnny Hardwick, voice of Dale on King Of The Hill and stand-up comedian

Voice actor and comedian Johnny Hardwick—best known for voicing Dale Gribble on the beloved Fox animated sitcom King Of The Hill—has died. This was first reported by TMZ (and later confirmed by Variety), which says that law enforcement officers were called to Hardwick’s home earlier this week for a welfare check, where he was pronounced dead. A cause of death has not been reported. Hardwick was 59.

Born in the ‘60s, Johnny Hardwick was a Texas native, just like the character he famously voiced for 13 years, but he didn’t get into show business until the ‘90s when he began performing stand-up comedy. He appeared on MTV’s The Jon Stewart Show, and after appearing at the Montreal Comedy Festival, he was given a chance to pitch a sitcom for NBC. It didn’t move ahead, but Hardwick continued working as a stand-up in Los Angeles.

As the story goes, after telling jokes about his father in Texas during a set at the famous Laugh Factory in L.A., Hardwick was approached by King Of The Hill co-creator Greg Daniels to potentially join the show as a writer. Speaking with The Austin Chronicle in 1999, Hardwick said that the part of paranoid, chain-smoking neighbor Dale Gribble was originally going to go to Daniel Stern, but he apparently “wanted a whole bunch of money” and walked. So, after “a series of incredibly lengthy auditions,” the role went to Hardwick.

In that same interview, he said that he hadn’t really conceived of what kind of person Dale would be until he got the part, saying he was “listening to William S. Burroughs one night” and “just got it.” He envisioned the character as someone who “thought he was Jack Nicholson but wasn’t” or someone who simply “thought he was the coolest guy around,” and while him being a conspiracy nut was there in the pilot, it sounds like every other evolution of Dale’s character—his exterminator job, his pet turtle, his frustrating ingenuity—came after Hardwick was involved.

Hardwick stayed on King Of The Hill for its entire 13-year run, appearing in every single episode except for one (season seven’s “An Officer And A Gentle Boy,” the only one where Dale, Bill, and Boomhauer don’t appear), in addition to serving as a writer and producer for a time. Hardwick didn’t do any voice acting after King Of The Hill, aside from reprising the role of Dale for the Fox animation-branded Warped Kart Racers phone game, but in recent years he began running a YouTube channel where he would primarily sing parody songs and do vlog updates as Dale Gribble (or as Rusty Shackelford, the name Dale would use to order pizzas).

Earlier this year, Hardwick and the other original King Of The Hill voice actors were announced as part of a Hulu revival of the beloved series. It’s unclear if those plans are still moving ahead.