The star of Pixar movies is always Pixar. Everyone knows their movies will be great, and often the most memorable voices are done by techies (Edna Mode anyone?) But they still manage to get a lineup of hot actors to voice their characters, and Cars is no exception. In addition to lead vocal Owen Wilson, they got screen legend Paul Newman to make perhaps his final appearance on film without his body.

“I found it very vivid and invigorating because you can have a line and you can say that it’s wrong and you can just jump on it and do it 60 different ways very back-to-back,” Newman said. With live action films, each take requires a reset. “15 minutes passes before you get another crack at it. This way is wonderful, because you can just keep improvising and improving on it or making it completely different or changing words. You just have a lot more freedom.”

When Larry the Cable Guy signed on to play Mater two years ago, he was just a rising comic on the circuit. The Blue Collar boom was yet to come but John Lasseter knew there was something about that voice. “I had never done voiceovers before,” Larry said. “I remember when I first started doing it, I did like the first five lines and I then I was starting to do another one, and I said, ‘John, can I do this line a little different because I just don’t feel comfortable the way they’ve got it written.’ And he said, ‘No, that’s what I want you to do. We love the voice. We want you to be this character so you do it how you want to. As long as you talk about the gist of what it’s talking about, I don’t care how you get there, just get there.’ That was a whole different thing. That’s when I started throwing stuff in and changing lines around. As long as I got where we were supposed to be, I could do that. That made it a lot more comfortable for me. The more I did it, the more I got comfortable in the studio.”

Bonnie Hunt plays her third Pixar character in Cars’s Porsche Sally. Such a sexy car might seem like a compliment, but Hunt only thought of Sally as a character. “From the very beginning, when John first called me, we didn’t even talk about what type of car it would be. We just talked character, which is so true to Pixar’s passion. So, it’s whether you are a bug, a monster, a toy or a car or a fish and you’re in a Pixar film, you’re going to have a heart and soul and dimension both technically, artistically and emotionally.”

NASCAR legend Richard Petty makes his acting debut as Cars’ champion The King. Although, he didn’t really consider it acting. Petty recalled, “Really, basically, John called one day and said, ‘Do you want to be in a movie?’ and I said, ‘What have I got to do?’ Then he told me the storyline of the movie and I said, ‘Yeah, that sounds great’. We just went and he give me a piece of paper and sort of led me into what the situation was so I could use expressions so he told me a little bit of where I was in the movie and leading into why I was supposed to be saying this stuff and what was going to be happening after me. I didn’t do any acting, I just went in a little studio and just read my little deal and we went to California and done that since we was racing up at Sedona and we dropped by and did that.”

Petty’s wife even got in on the deal. “My wife went with me and her and John got to talking and she got to talking about the good old days and how she used to take the kids, Kyle and all his sisters and everybody and went to the racetrack, and they would park in the infield and she had a station wagon and she’d put the back down and fix sandwiches for everybody and they’d just party and have a picnic. John got to talking to her and said ‘you want to be in the movie’? She said ‘what am I supposed to say or do?’ He sat right there and wrote her right into the script as needed. In my mind, he had an overall story and he just fills in whatever the situation is.”

The staple of Pixar movies, John Ratzenberger returns as the voice of Mack, a Mack truck. Pixar often calls Ratzenberger their good luck charm because they’ve been blockbuster successes ever since they started casting him in their films. “That's up to them, not to me,” Ratzenberger said. “You dance with the one that brought you. And I just enjoy it because the beauty of it for me is I started my career in London years ago, worked with directors like Robert Aldrich and people who were directing films in the Golden Age of Hollywood. And this is like going back to that because they work on a film, work on a story for four years before they bring it to the screen. And they write about what they know about. A minute into the film, you forget you're watching animated cars because there's a heart and a soul. There's a story arc. It's like a Capra movie. Every single character has got their own story arc. It's not just two characters up front and everyone else is forgotten about. So their attention to detail is phenomenal. So for me, to be able to work with them on a yearly basis is a treat.”

Cheech Marin, who plays the low rider Ramon, felt comfortable lending his voice to the film because he got his start making spoken word albums. “Cheech and Chong records were animation without the animation,” Marin said. “So I grew up doing that, and I really like doing it, creating the whole world out of voice. It's a different kind of acting. It's like sculpting with a chainsaw. The arcs you describe are really big. It's very broad and it's very loud. I've always found that you can't get too big in animation because you're competing with this huge image that you have to match a voice to, and I found that other characters I've seen in animation where they try to do kind of a normal voice just, it just falls flat. So it's how to compete with that big rambunctious image. It's a tone you have to get. It's pretty loud. It's like the difference between film acting and stage acting. With stage acting you have to project out there. It's more akin to stage acting actually than film acting because the subtlety just doesn't work for animation.”

Cars opens Friday.