Charlie Day Names Luigi Mangione as Favorite Luigi

The question on the Tintoria podcast in Tokyo was deliberate. "You play Luigi, a great Italian guy," the interviewer asked Charlie Day on or around April 1, 2026. "Who's your favorite Luigi in recent American history?" One of the interviewers later said the answer Day gave was "exactly" what they had wanted.

Day, who voices Luigi in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, obliged without hesitation: "Well, me, first of all... Number one. Luigi Mangione, number two." Keegan-Michael Key, seated nearby, shouted. Anya Taylor-Joy covered her face with her hand. The clip was online within hours, spreading across Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky as the film's opening-weekend numbers were still being counted.

The timing compressed everything into a single news cycle. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, produced by Illumination and Nintendo and distributed by Universal Pictures, had just recorded a $372 million worldwide opening weekend on a $110 million budget, including a domestic five-day gross of approximately $190 million, the biggest debut of 2026 by any film. The sequel to The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023), directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, was the year's highest-grossing animated release before the first full week was out. Nintendo's film bet, three years in the making, was paying off commercially at a scale few studios anticipated.

Then Day put Luigi Mangione's name next to Luigi's.

Mangione is the man charged with the December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan. He has pleaded not guilty to both state and federal charges and has not been convicted of anything. His terror-related murder charges were dismissed in September 2025. Federal death penalty charges were dismissed in January 2026. His federal trial has been delayed until 2027. The legal record is significantly more complicated than Day's off-the-cuff ranking suggested, and the name's collision with a Nintendo character beloved by children is precisely the kind of unscripted moment that brand-safety teams at companies like Nintendo spend considerable energy trying to prevent.

Nintendo has never had an actor officially attached to a Mario franchise property link the Mangione case to the IP on a live, recorded platform, making Day's comment a first for a company that exercises unusually tight control over its characters, licensing, and public-facing talent messaging. The Luigi-Mangione internet meme had been running since Mangione's arrest; fans had shown up to court appearances wearing Nintendo-inspired Luigi outfits. But the viral joke had always existed at a comfortable distance from the official franchise. Day closed that distance in about four seconds on a podcast.

IGN reported the comment would likely rattle Nintendo, describing the prospect of "upended tea tables" at the company. Jack Black, who voices Bowser in the film and was separately doing press in New York City, was asked about the incident and called Day "amazing." Some social media users called for a boycott of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, with one post reading "Well I'm not watching and boycotting the movie now." Others argued the Tintoria interviewer had deliberately constructed the question to produce exactly that result, which the interviewer later confirmed.

The core issue for Nintendo and its partners is not whether Day meant the comment as a joke, or whether the setup was transparent. It is that a live podcast format, with no pre-approval process for interviewer questions, delivered a soundbite tying the company's most family-facing IP to an active murder case, on the opening day of its biggest film investment, and that clip is now the internet's dominant association with the movie's press tour. For a company whose brand discipline is the stuff of industry legend, the gap between what Nintendo controls in a scripted trailer and what it cannot control in a Tokyo podcast studio is the real story.