TALK to American actor Hank Azaria and you also hear from Boris Karloff, Jerry Lewis and a whole raft of characters from The Simpsons.

Even in his latest movie, Night At The Museum 2, the producers get more than their money’s worth from him. His main role, in which he’s seen and heard in a Boris Karloff voice, is Egyptian ruler Kahmunrah, but you’ll also hear him as Abraham Lincoln, whose statue comes to life, and Rodin’s The Thinker.

Azaria owns up to imitating Karloff’s English lisping tones as the mummy, who’s not best pleased to be woken from a 3,000 year sleep in the Museum sequel, again starring Ben Stiller.

“I didn’t see the original Mummy with Karloff. I watched it once I knew I was going to do this, but knew him from some other stuff as well. He was so imitated when I was a kid, the Monster Mash and all that stuff. It was more that imitation I was doing,” explains Azaria.

After a cast reading, the studio head said to him, “You’re a voice guy, can’t we push it a little?” he continues.

“We were reluctant to, and then I went for a wardrobe test and while there, getting the costume on film, we tried four or five different versions of the character.

Really weird versions.

“At the last minute I went, ‘what about Karloff, he was a mummy’ and did it as a joke really. Ben Stiller and the director really laughed at it, and said that’s what we should go for.

“Then it made sense to me because trying to be scary the way Karloff was scary is pretty antiquated now, which was correct for this character. When you go, ‘I was dead’ that was scary in 1932, but it’s not now. So that’s how we ended up there.”

He’s used up his repertoire of voices on The Simpsons, on which he’s been providing character voices from the start and has won three Emmy awards for his work on the show.

“Now everyone I’ve done or can possibly do, any voice, any noise I can make has been used, even Karloff,” he says.

“I’d never done it on the Simpsons and then this past Hallowe’en episode we did a Lugosi-Karloff sort of takeoff, so I ended up using Karloff for The Simpsons.”

The animated series is currently in its 21st year and there’s definitely another season after that. He can’t see any reason for it to end – makers Fox are happy with it, it’s a well-oiled machine and everyone’s still having a good time.

The amount of time he spends on the series is “embarrassingly small”, he says. “For the writers, it never ends. They work very hard, a script is always in some version of animation and they never stop rewriting.

“I do an hour on Thursday, when we read the script, and about four hours on Monday, when we record an original episode.”

“Then about for an hour. So six, seven hours a week.

It’s the best job in the world, I think.”

His favourite voice is Professor Frink because he was a Jerry Lewis fan as a young man. He says this while doing Lewis’s voice and adds, “See how I rip off all the wonderful stars of yesteryear?

“Once you start talking like that it’s very hard to stop. On each take, I’ll make it sillier, I always have. I’ll add more and more stupid noises and sounds to it. If they let me keep going, it gets ridiculous.

They have to stop me.”

MANY accents have eluded him to start with, but if he can’t get it right away, he’ll spend a month trying to capture the voice.

British is hard because it’s close to American and it’s easier to do something far away, like Italian.

He’s done Irish and Scottish on The Simpsons, although gets very self-conscious doing Anglo accents in front of people from those countries, because he knows that they’re listening to see how he does. “British culture has been traumatised by Dick Van Dyke’s portrayal in Mary Poppins.

“That said, I can do a bit of Irish, but it’s not very good. I did Paul O’Grady’s show yesterday and couldn’t understand a word he was saying.”

As a youngster, he found he could mimic people and carried on doing it. He imitated everyone – friends, TV characters, relatives, teachers especially. “I find if you don’t like someone you really get a good impression of them done because there’s aggression behind it, a genuine feeling of wanting to mock really helps out an impression.”

■ Night At The Museum 2 opens in cinemas on Wednesday. The Simpsons: C4, 6pm, Monday to Friday.