It's interesting for me to backtrack where specific influences came from and I'm the first to admit that I don't "cast" any of my characters with recognizable faces from the silver screen or in life, that faces are nebulous to me as I'm writing, but one thing I have with absolutely clarity is a character's voice. Unfortunately, it's hard for me to describe what someone *sounds* like in interviews or panels, but once in a while I can re-discover where a certain timbre, tone or cadence comes from, which is exactly what happened with Graus Claude.
Best. Voice. Ever.
Most often I credit James Earl Jones with the rumbling burr I gave to my four-armed, eight-foot amphibian with a mild case of scoliosis and a major case of propriety, but while the bass roar and elocution are unmistakably Mr. Jones', the style of speech has its roots in Prof. Maximillian P. Arturo from the 80's scifi series, Sliders, as played by John Rhys-Davis.
Dwarves clean up nicely, don't they?
I hadn't even realized it until I'd recently watched the final episode of The Librarians which featured Jerry O'Connell as the young Lancelot (opposite Matt Frewer as the old Lancelot...who I'd been watching as Dr. Leekie in Orphan Black, but that's another story). ANYway, this prompted me to look up the name of the actor who played Quinn Mallory and then note that Sliders was on Netflix, so I queued up the first episode and was reunited with what could have possibly been my first introduction to the speech pattern I'd use for Graus Claude. (Of course, the less said about that revisiting of a cherished childhood drama, the better.)
And this, my friends, is how my brain works.