Matthew Gray Gubler Audiobooks

Rumple Buttercup: a gentle story about being the odd one out

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.9/5 average

9 listener ratings

Who is Matthew Gray Gubler?

Most people know the face first. Matthew Gray Gubler, born in Las Vegas in 1980, spent fifteen seasons as Dr Spencer Reid in Criminal Minds and directed a number of its episodes, alongside film work in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, 500 Days of Summer and Life After Beth, plus the voice of Simon in the Alvin and the Chipmunks films.

Less widely known is that he trained as a filmmaker at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, modelled before he acted, and has drawn compulsively for as long as he has performed. Rumple Buttercup began as pages he made for himself, and his illustrations keep the wobbly, hand-lettered quality of something never intended for a boardroom.

That is the through line in his work: a fondness for the misfit, played entirely straight. Reid was television’s most beloved oddball, and Gubler’s writing for children extends the same courtesy to any small listener who has ever felt conspicuously strange.

Matthew Gray Gubler in audiobooks

Rumple Buttercup: A Story of Bananas, Belonging, and Being Yourself is a picture book about a green creature with five crooked teeth who hides under a banana peel because he is convinced he is too weird to be seen. It is very short, very sincere, and quietly devastating for anyone who has ever felt like the odd one out.

The audio edition is read by Gubler himself and lasts twelve minutes, and the brevity is the point: this is a bedtime listen, a short car journey, or a small comfort administered on a bad day. His delivery is unhurried and faintly conspiratorial, exactly the register the story wants.

It is on its way into the catalogue rather than already sitting here, so use the listing below to see what is ready to play.