The Man Behind the Minions

When the French animation studio Illumination was developing “Despicable Me,” an ingratiating family comedy about a second rate supervillain and his adopted children, the team decided that the movie needed some lighthearted relief to help make the movie’s antihero, Gru (Steve Carell), more sympathetic.

So the directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, alongside the character designer Eric Guillon and the producer Chris Meledandri, came up with the Minions, a flock of mischievous yellow creatures that would scurry about in the background and cheer on their nefarious leader.

Coffin, a French Indonesian animator, offered to improvise some high-pitched gibberish dialogue for the characters, which he’d occasionally done working previously in commercials, until a celebrity voice actor could be added at a later date.

But as it turned out, Coffin’s voice stuck: Test audiences loved his distinctive staccato giggle and melodic nonsense speak. And so, since 2010, Coffin has been the unlikely star of one of the largest pop cultural phenomena of the century, reprising the role for the sixth time on the big screen in the new sequel “Despicable Me 4,” which comes to theaters Wednesday.

“After the last movie, I told Chris Meledandri, ‘I have to stop doing anything Minion-related, I’ve got to do something else,’” Coffin said in a recent video interview from an animation festival he was attending in southeastern France. “But there’s something very appealing that I really like about those characters. So even when I say that I want to get out of it, then I think, ‘Oh, I should do that, it’s fun!’”

Born in France in 1967 to the novelist Nh. Dini and the diplomat Yves Coffin, Pierre’s childhood was spent partly in the United States, which made an outsized impression on his young mind. “I was overwhelmed, like ‘This is the greatest country ever: They have all these movies!’” he said.