Nick Park: Hollywood tried to replace Peter Sallis. But the late Queen intervened

Could this be the most-anticipated speaking debut in a century?

Back in 1930, posters heralded Greta Garbo's first talkie, Anna Christie, with the fevered slogan "Garbo Talks!". On Thursday, 37 years after Wallace & Gromit – the inventor and his mute dog – first graced the screen in A Grand Day Out, Gromit's voice will finally be let off the leash.

From his typewriter at 62 West Wallaby Street, Wigan, Wallace's best friend has written a book: Grand: The Autobiography of Gromit: As Told to Nick Park. Threaded through a new whodunnit is the canine's backstory (he arrived at Wallace's terraced house as a surprise package, and was almost named Wensleydale).

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The pun-packed tome also runs through many of the duo's greatest adventures, including visiting the Moon (which had a smell "that is blue and ripe with just a pinch of Labrador bum") and the hapless dreamer falling in love with wool shop owner Wendolene Ramsbottom ("Was I jealous of Wallace making eyes at someone. Perhaps, yes that's fair").

Delightfully, the book is published by Penguin, giving Park and co-writer James Goss plenty of scope to introduce a cameo from Feathers McGraw, the penguin lodger disguised as a chicken who made his villainous debut in 1993's The Wrong Trousers.

If you're wondering what Gromit actually sounds like, well, it is Tim from The Office – Martin Freeman voices the audiobook. So Lancashire's most famous dog is not actually from the North? (Freeman grew up in Hampshire.)

"I did even try [a Northern accent] a little bit with Martin," says his creator, Nick Park, the man dubbed "Preston's answer to Walt Disney". "But I've never thought of him [Gromit] with an actual Northern accent for some reason. I think because he doesn't have one. So in his own head, I don't know what he is."

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You see, to Park, these characters are more than just blobs of modelling clay. They have inner voices and psyches, and Park has even conceded in the past that they are a bit like his children. They are also global intellectual properties, with a multimillion-pound merchandising empire and an ever-growing range of platforms on which to enchant us.

I am talking to Park at Lightroom in King's Cross, where Aardman is celebrating its 50th anniversary with Larger Than Life, a new 50-minute immersive projection of the history of the Bristol-based animation studio. The hit exhibition Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends is still running at the Young V&A museum, until mid-November, while an entire shop has opened at Battersea Power Station.

The 67-year-old is rather like his creations – gentle, smiley and soft around the edges – but he is quietly cautious about the scale of interest. Every Park utterance is at risk of making headlines, such as when he mentioned last month that Gromit had first been conceived as a cat.

"Gromit is never going to speak physically," he is at pains to point out. And when he describes the creature as a big dog, "like a Labrador or something", he rushes to clarify that the typing pooch is no particular breed, lest this also catch light.

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Park, the middle of five children of a seamstress and architectural photographer, came up with the characters in 1982, as his graduation project at the National Film and Television School. But his method of choice, stop-motion, is so painstaking – producing just three seconds of footage a day – that Park was facing years to finish it. He met Aardman founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton, who put him on the payroll.

Park was able to use their studios to complete his film, while working part-time on their productions. These included the record nine-time MTV award-winning music video for Peter Gabriel's 1986 hit Sledgehammer. Park was tasked with animating frozen chickens in place of the ex-Genesis singer as they quickly went rancid under the studio lights. "There was a big salmonella scare at the time, so I was dressed in this hazmat suit." He also directed zoo-based mockumentary Creature Comforts and when he won an Oscar for it in 1991, he managed to beat himself (he was also nominated for A Grand Day Out).

When it comes to the march of artificial intelligence, Park tries not "to be anti, like a stick in the mud or whatever". "We've always aspired to be film-makers, and animation is just the way that we make films," he once thought. But he has recently concluded that "it's more than that. Actually something comes with the clay. It was through the physical manipulation of the character's eyebrow that I found the personality of Gromit, kind of by accident. I don't know if that would have happened if it was CGI".

He is open to experimenting with AI but "so far I'm not too impressed with the soul aspect. So I don't know if there's a button you'll be able to press that puts the soul into it." That sounds like an eccentrically bonkers Wallace idea for an invention, I think to myself.

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I mention that Garbo was brought back from the dead – with the aid of AI and permission of her descendants – only last month, to star in an advert for ball bearings. Has Park contemplated what will happen to Wallace & Gromit after he shuffles off this Plasticine coil? Will we one day see them AI-ed into a toothpaste commercial?

"Not on my watch, no," he says resolutely. And what about after your watch? "Well, no, I want to safeguard against that. Right now, I can't say any more. That's how I feel, yeah. I think they've got to be clay."

Even in his own lifetime, he has had to contend with the man and dog taking on a life of their own. As Labour leader, Ed Miliband was frequently parodied as Wallace in countless newspaper cartoons. Eventually, the politician even embraced the toothy cheese addict. "This is who I am," he said in a 2011 speech. "The son of a Jewish refugee and Marxist academic… Somebody who looks a bit like Wallace from Wallace & Gromit."

Park neither confirms nor denies an old report that Aardman were less keen on the comparison, even convening a meeting to discuss the potential reputational fallout for their creation. "It was funny for a while, but it started to get too much in a way, because there were quite distorted pictures of both. It was bad for Wallace and –" Park says, before cutting himself off with a chuckle and an eye on the publicist. Then he smartly projects a possible answer on to Wallace. "I remember Nick Newman, the cartoonist I worked with actually, did a drawing of Wallace looking dejected, thinking 'This is terrible for my image.'"

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Park recruited Last of the Summer Wine's Peter Sallis at the start, offering him his last £50 to record the voice of Wallis. However, once the Wiganites prepared to hit the silver screen in 2005, he tells me that it was not the actor's (adopted) northern twang that fazed Hollywood suits, but his age.

"To be honest, they probably would have replaced Peter Sallis actually, because they thought 'Oh, he's 80-something, how's this going to appeal to kids?'" Park dug his heels in, with the endorsement of a monarch. "She was a fan," says Park of the late Queen, who had the animator sit next to her at a lunch in her 80th year (while she fed the corgis biscuits under the table).

"It was like chatting with my mum," says Park fondly. "I remember then talking about Peter Sallis actually and how [US studio] DreamWorks said, 'Maybe we ought to rethink.' And I remember her saying, 'You ought to hang on to him!'" Suffice to say, Sallis remained.

After visiting Aardman's studio, Elizabeth II had been presented with models of two of its earliest characters – the mayhem-making clay men who emerged from Tony Hart's pencil box. And she later told Park: "Oh, the grandchildren – Harry and William – love to come in and see Morph and Chas on my desk."

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As much as he says there was mutual respect between Aardman and DreamWorks (their partnership ran between 1999 and 2007), I sense a palpable relief at not having to battle to stop his creations ceding their innate Britishness to the focus groups of Middle America.

In 2005's The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, one line raised eyebrows, after the titular bunny wreaked havoc in the town's gardens: "Look at my wife's brassicas – ravaged in the night!" "Obviously, meaning cauliflowers," clarifies Park, who has such a charming innocence that you can almost believe he had never considered the double entendre. "The audience reaction was, 'We don't know what it means, but it sounds rude', so they asked us to change it." He adds: "But we didn't."

Even with Netflix, who only acted as distributor of W&G's most recent outing, Vengeance Most Fowl – and "were brilliant" – questions were raised. "Chief Inspector Mackintosh, [voiced by] Peter Kay, when he sees Feathers McGraw at the end, he shouts, 'Flipping Nora!' "And we got a studio note back saying, 'Who's Nora? And should we introduce her earlier?'"

Attempts to alter Wallace's vehicle also stalled. "I remember there was one comment from one exec saying, 'Wouldn't it be great if Wallace & Gromit's car was more like a cool American pickup truck?' And I thought, 'Nah!' It's an Austin A35. It's cool because it's not cool."

The same could be said of you, I tell Park. "Maybe," he says, giggling self-consciously. "I was born uncool, I think." The humility of the man who has said he grew up thinking "people from Preston don't go to film school" endures. He has not got any of his four Oscars at home; they are all sprinkled around the offices. "Films are never made by one person alone," he explains.

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In 2016, he married Mags Connolly ("the cheese to my crackers", as he says in the book's dedication). They still divide their time between their house in Bristol and one in Preston. And he still has the same holiday campervan. "Yeah, sorry, it's not very interesting."

Such is the worldwide popularity of the man described by The Washington Post as "the undisputed, undefeated king of animation" that there is a constant hankering for more Wallace & Gromit. But he brings a Northern groundedness to that problem too. "I've got a couple of ideas in the pipeline that I have pitched at the studio," he reveals. "It's wonderful to see what an appetite there is for it. I have to pinch myself a bit. But I can't be pressured either." He has only made six W&G films (a total of 276 minutes) in 44 years.

Park says he has to make sure to wait for the times when "the idea grabs you and demands to be made. The films have got to remain very special and something worth waiting for," he says, explaining his resolve to resist the clamour. "Success is a very hungry animal."

Grand: The Autobiography of Gromit: As Told to Nick Park will be published on 22 October (Ebury Spotlight, £22). Larger than Life: Starring Wallace & Gromit, Shaun and More runs at Lightroom in Kings Cross until 4 January, 2027 (tickets: here)

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