Remember Who You Are: Honoring Paweł Tucholski, the Polish Voice of Simba and Aladdin
Paweł Tucholski · February 6, 1969 – October 30, 2026
For millions of children who grew up in Poland, Simba didn’t sound like Matthew Broderick, and Aladdin didn’t sound like Scott Weinger. They sounded like Paweł Tucholski.
Tucholski, the actor and singer who gave his voice to adult Simba in the Polish version of The Lion King and to Aladdin across the films and animated series, died on October 30, 2026. He was 57. His family has not shared a cause of death, and we won’t speculate.
At Yes and Land, we spend every episode looking at Disney stories for what they teach us about leading and living. So it feels right to pause and honor a man whose voice carried those exact lessons to a whole generation, in their own language.
A Voice That Crossed Borders
Tucholski was born in Żnin, a small town in north-central Poland, and trained at the State Theatre School in Warsaw. His career spanned the stage, film, television, and musical theatre, including years with Warsaw’s Teatr Dramatyczny and more than twenty screen roles. Many Polish viewers also remember him from the first season of Your Face Sounds Familiar in 2014.
But his most enduring work happened in a recording booth. In the 1993 Polish dub of Aladdin, he didn’t just speak the role. He sang it, performing the Polish versions of “One Jump Ahead” and “A Whole New World.” He stayed with the character through the animated series and Aladdin and the King of Thieves. In 1994, he became the voice of adult Simba.
One detail says a lot about the man. His Jasmine, and later his Nala, was Katarzyna Skrzynecka, a friend from his drama school days. Two classmates grew up to sing Disney’s great love duets for an entire country.
Dubbing is one of the most invisible crafts in entertainment. A great dub actor has to match mouth movements frame by frame, deliver translated lyrics that still land on the melody, and find the same emotional truth the original performer found. When it’s done well, nobody notices. The character simply speaks your language, and the story becomes yours.
That is what Tucholski gave Polish audiences: not a translation of Simba and Aladdin, but Simba and Aladdin themselves.
“Remember Who You Are” in Every Language
Think about which Simba Tucholski voiced. Not the carefree cub. The grown lion who has been running from his past, who has to hear his father’s words, stop hiding, and go home to lead.
That arc is the heart of so many conversations on this show. Leadership rarely starts with confidence. It starts with remembering who you are when everything around you is telling you to forget. We dug into exactly that with Jeremy Cameron in Lion King and Self-Trust: the difference between Simba’s self-trust, rooted in love, and Scar’s, rooted in fear.
Aladdin carries a lesson that sits right beside it. He’s a kid with nothing who is judged by everyone who sees him, and the whole story turns on a simple truth: your worth was never about the title, the palace, or the disguise. It was about who you were when no one was watching.
Stories like these travel because the truths inside them are universal. But they only reach us because someone, in every language, gives them a voice. For Poland, for more than three decades, that someone was Paweł Tucholski.
Still Working, Still Becoming
Perhaps the most moving part of his story is how it ends. Just three days before his death, the Tadeusz Różewicz Theatre in Gliwice announced that Tucholski had joined its permanent acting company. He had been recording voice work into 2026. At 57, he was still auditioning, still joining new teams, still building what came next.
There’s a leadership lesson in that too, and it’s a gentle one. We’re never finished growing. The people who leave the deepest mark are often the ones who keep saying yes to the next chapter.
Keep Listening
If this has you thinking about the Pride Lands, or about how we carry loss, these Yes and Land conversations are a good place to spend some time:
- Lion King and Self-Trust | Jeremy Cameron: Simba, Scar, and how to tell real self-trust from ego dressed up as confidence.
- The Lion King with Alton Fitzgerald White: one of Broadway’s most celebrated Mufasas on turning a painful childhood into purpose on the Pride Rock stage.
- Encanto and Losing Everything | James on Finding Purpose: a father’s story of grief, and of finding meaning on the other side of loss.
Our thoughts are with Paweł Tucholski’s family, his friends, his colleagues on stage and in the booth, and everyone who grew up hearing his voice.
He reminded a generation who they are. We hope they remember him.
Reporting sources: RMF FM, Interia Film, Dziennik Zachodni, Dubbingpedia.
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