Lady Dimitrescu first appeared in a January 2021 teaser trailer that quickly cemented Resident Evil Village's place in the public consciousness as "the game with the big vampire lady." She swept the hearts, minds, and creative outputs of hordes of fan artists with such ferocity that I'm still not sure whether I could safely do a google image search on my work browser. According to Maggie Robertson, the actor who brought the vampire giantess to life, the role was equally transformative for her.
Robertson recently spoke to Entertainment Weekly as part of a group interview with the "Pixel Pack," a group of high profile videogame voice actors gathered by Neil Newbon, who played Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3. The Pixel Pack aims to raise awareness and solidarity for their craft as they face challenges like the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike.
Many of the interviewed Pixel Pack actors, like Mass Effect femshep actor Jennifer Hale, spoke about a fading distinction that used to separate videogame acting talent from their theater and stage peers. Echoing that sentiment, Robertson said that her Lady Dimitrescu performance was informed by her history in Shakespearean acting.
"Having a Shakespeare background, I pulled a lot of Shakespeare stuff into this. There was something very Shakespearean in the way that she utilizes language," Robertson said. "It's not just the claws, it's not just her transforming into a beast at the end that does damage. It's her words. She really uses the power of her words to hurt."
I can't speak to how well Shakespeare's works channel the presence of a towering monster lady, but being able to employ those more traditional acting techniques for her Dimitrescu performance clearly paid off—even if Robertson wasn't entirely prepared for the impact the character would have.
"I had no concept at that time of what being in a video game could offer me in my career, in my life. My only intention was to do the best work that I could do and, honestly, not make a fool of myself," Robertson said. "And then to see the way that she was embraced by audiences, it was just very surreal. It really truly changed my life in every possible way."
Since playing Lady Dimitrescu in Resident Evil Village, Robertson has continued her voice and motion capture performances in games like God of War: Ragnarok, Baldur's Gate 3, and more.
We spoke to Robertson back in 2021, where she went into deeper detail about the overlap between her theater background and her work in Resident Evil. Comparing her experience in Lady Dimitrescu's motion capture sessions—her first time doing performance capture—to black box theater, Robertson said her classical acting background made her "uniquely primed" to inhabit the role.
"It's just playing. It goes back to being a kid and using your imagination to create these fabulous worlds," Robertson said. "That feels like it gets at the real core of why I wanted to be an actor in the first place."
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