John Leguizamo has spent nearly a quarter-century voicing a wisecracking sloth named Sid, and that work has paid off well beyond the box office.
“It paid my bills! It got me a second and a triple home. It paid for my kids’ college,” the 66-year-old actor said with a laugh in a recent interview.
Leguizamo also talked about ICE AGE: BOILING POINT, the sixth movie in the animated franchise, which arrives in theaters in February 2027. He’s voiced Sid the Sloth since the original ICE AGE premiered in 2002, sticking with the character through ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN, ICE AGE: DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS, ICE AGE: CONTINENTAL DRIFT and ICE AGE: COLLISION COURSE.
“Movies are more dramatic usually, but in that, I got to be hilarious. I got to be so silly and create this incredible character and creature,” he said, explaining that the role has let him lean into comedy in a career built mostly on drama.
Entertainment Tonight also showed Leguizamo footage from a 2002 interview in which he described how he built Sid’s signature lisp. “I said, ‘Give me some Discovery Channel footage on sloths,’ and of course, you’re watching, and it’s like there’s a sloth on fire and he’s running,” he recalled. “And just when I was about to turn it off two hours later it still hadn’t moved. The narrator said, ‘They store food in their mouths.’ That’s how I started to come up with this sort of lateral lisp, from all the food.”
Related: ICE AGE Fans, Rejoice: The 6th Movie’s Teaser Is Here
Watching the old clip back, Leguizamo admitted he “can’t really let go of Sid the Sloth,” laughing as he caught himself slipping into the character’s lisp mid-conversation.
“Now we got number six coming up. They’re reuniting the trio, bringing Queen Latifah abroad and I think J. Lo’s in it as well. I mean, everybody’s coming back for this one,” he teased, referring to reported returning cast members Ray Romano, Denis Leary and Simon Pegg alongside Queen Latifah.
The first teaser for ICE AGE: BOILING POINT dropped in June 2026. Deadline described the movie as “a dinosaur-and-lava-filled madcap adventure that takes Manny, Sid, Diego, Ellie, Scrat and the rest of the herd to visit never-before-seen corners of the treacherous Lost World.”
The ICE AGE franchise has stuck around for a reason: two decades in, it’s still the kind of movie a family can put on together without anyone wincing. Leguizamo crediting one animated sloth for literally funding his kids’ education is a small, funny reminder that clean, well-made family entertainment can be good business too — not just for studios, but for the people who show up to make audiences laugh.
The ICE AGE movies are currently streaming on Disney+.
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