Dan Scanlon was an animator for The Indescribable Nth and Joseph: King of Dreams. He served as a storyboard artist for The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea and 101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure. He is the director of the upcoming Pixar film Monsters University, due to release in 2013.

Scanlon currently works at Pixar, and was a story artist for Cars and Toy Story 3. He co-directed the short film Mater and the Ghostlight. He illustrated part one of Unmentionables a comic book written by his wife, Michele Scanlon, and wrote and directed the liv- action feature film Tracy. Tracy was Scanlon’s first feature film as a writer/director. He was recently announced as the director of the June 2013 Pixar film, Monsters University.

Scanlon graduated with a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design in 1998. He has worked professionally in the animation industry as a story artist for the last ten years.

Scanlon and his wife live in San Francisco and work together on projects under the production company name Caveat Productions.

William Edward "Billy" Crystal (born March 14, 1948) is an American actor, writer, producer, comedian, and film director. He gained prominence in the 1970s for playing Jodie Dallas on the ABC sitcom Soap and became a Hollywood film star during the late 1980s and 1990s, appearing in the critical and box office successes When Harry Met Sally... and City Slickers. He has hosted the Academy Awards nine times, including the 84th Academy Awards in 2012.

Crystal was born in the Doctor's Hospital in Manhattan and raised on Long Island in Long Beach, the son of Helen (née Gabler), a housewife, and Jack Crystal, a record company executive and jazz producer who also owned and operated the Commodore Record store. His babysitter was occasionally Billie Holiday. His uncle was musician and songwriter Milt Gabler, and his brother, Richard "Rip" Crystal, is a television producer. Crystal grew up in a Jewish family that he has described as "large" and "loving".

After graduation from Long Beach High School, Crystal attended Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia on a baseball scholarship, having learned the game from his father, who pitched for St. John's University. Crystal never played a game at Marshall because the program was suspended during his freshman year, and because he was too busy being the Editor in Chief of The BG News from 1969–70. He did not return to Marshall as a sophomore, staying back in New York with his future wife. He instead attended Nassau Community College and later New York University, where he graduated in 1970 with a BFA from its Tisch School of the Arts.

John Stephen Goodman (born June 20, 1952) is an American film, television, and stage actor. He is best known for his role as Dan Conner on the television series Roseanne (1988–1997) for which he won a Best Actor Golden Globe Award in 1993.

Goodman was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His mother, Virginia Roos (née Loosmore), was a store clerk and waitress who worked at Jack and Phil's Bar-B-Que, and his father, Leslie F. Goodman, was a postal worker who died of a heart attack in 1954. He has a sister, Elisabeth Horvath, and a brother, Leslie.

Goodman went to Affton High School, where he played football and dabbled in theater. He then won a football scholarship to Southwest Missouri State University, now called Missouri State University. He pledged the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, but was not formally initiated until several years later. Later he discovered Southwest Missouri's drama program. He studied there with actors Kathleen Turner and Tess Harper. After a college injury ended his football career, he decided to become a professional actor, leaving Missouri for New York in 1975.

Dame Helen Mirren, DBE (born Helen Lydia Mironoff; 26 July 1945) is an English actor. She has won an Academy Award for Best Actress, four SAG Awards, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, four Emmy Awards, and two Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Awards.

Mirren was born Helen Lydia Mironoff in Queen Charlotte's Hospital, Chiswick, West London. Her father, Vasiliy Petrovich Mironov (1913–1980), was of Russian origin, and her mother, Kitty (née Kathleen Alexandrina Eva Matilda Rogers; 1909–1996), was English. Mirren's paternal grandfather, Colonel Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, was in the Tsarist Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. He later became a diplomat, and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain, when he and his family were stranded during the Russian Revolution. The former diplomat became a London cab driver to support his family.

His son, Helen Mirren's father, changed the family name to the Scottish-sounding Mirren in the 1950s and became known as Basil Mirren. He played the viola with the London Philharmonic before World War II, and later drove a cab and was a driving-test examiner, before becoming a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport. Mirren's mother was from West Ham, East London, and was the 13th of 14 children born to a butcher whose father had been the butcher to Queen Victoria. Mirren considers her upbringing to have been "very anti-monarchist".