Matt Mahoney
Matt Mahoney is a beaver and the speechwriter for Commissioner Elizabeth McHerd at Zootopia's Department of External Relations. He is introduced in the W-Series, traveling with the DER delegation to Vladifrostok in "Diplomatic Immunity".
Background
Matt writes what the Commissioner says in public, working on a yellow legal pad at the shipboard briefing and at a laptop by the ninth draft. He is also the only delegate on the trip issued a second blazer, after borscht got the first one during the crossing, and because he is wearing the spare there is nothing to lend the pack once all four of theirs are ruined.
Personality
He is a compulsive reviser. In the briefing room he writes a line, strikes it, writes it again, strikes it again and starts a clean page, and not one mammal at the table looks up while he does it. Rejection sends him back to the pad rather than into an argument, and his composure wears down visibly as the trip goes on.
Series History
W-Series
Matt spends "Diplomatic Immunity" failing to finish a single speech. He begins the Commissioner's closing remarks on the second day of the crossing, and she sends each version back for a fresh reason. Nick keeps helping without being asked, and by the fifth day in Vladifrostok the help has amounted to a napkin of suggestions, two pages shoved under his door at an hour he would rather not state, and one hallway pitch about working a fox's quick thinking into the account of the weather wall, which Matt can repeat word for word. The kitchen door has started getting locked.
At draft nine he is stalled in front of the laptop with his paws off the keys when Luther, on his way back up from the stairwell, halts in the open doorway. Luther corrects the account of the Root first: Icener was given the location by Milton Lynxley and never got the codes, and the failsafe sealed the place first, so what happened there was a betrayal rather than a security failure. Then he reads a line crediting a coordination framework for the crisis response and says that nothing steered that response at all, that Costa commanded operations at the Crisis Coordination Center while everyone else improvised, and that the framework was written afterward out of what the improvising had cost. He starts to say who wrote it, stops, and goes. Draft eleven is the one McHerd delivers at the farewell dinner, with Matt following the words silently from the staff table, and it credits nobody by name.
Key Relationships
Elizabeth McHerd
The Commissioner rejects ten drafts and delivers the eleventh. One objection was that the section on the Lynxley infrastructure reads as an accusation; Matt takes it back to the page rather than back to her.
Luther Pawthorne
Luther reads over his shoulder briefly and leaves him with one factual correction and a sentence he never finishes, which is the whole of their professional contact.
Trivia
- Matt Mahoney is based on Matt Mahoney, speechwriter to Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord in the television series Madam Secretary.