Voice acting has been an underestimated profession for a while now—and, while things have certainly improved, there are new fights for voiceover artists to grapple with, like the knock-down, drag-out fight SAG-AFTRA is currently embroiled in over AI.
That's why Astarion's voice actor, Neil Newbon, has assembled a group of actors called the 'Pixel Pack', as revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. The full interview spans a few big-name talents like Matthew Mercer and Yuri Lowenthal, and is well worth a read—though one quote from Mass Effect's Jennifer Hale really stands as an example of how rough voice actors have had it.
If you're not aware, Hale voiced the female Commander Shepard—often abbreviated to 'femshep'—making her the de facto protagonist of Bioware's flagship trilogy, as well as the voice you hear the most throughout the game. However, as she reveals in the interview, she basically had to go in cold.
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"The work we do in games—this does not cover performance capture but in voice capture—is 85-90% cold reading," Hale reveals. "The entirety of Mass Effect, I saw no line before the moment I recorded it. It was all cold reading on the spot. A couple takes, maybe a few, and it goes out to market. That's it."
I want to emphasise again that Hale wasn't a bit part, a side-NPC, or someone doing random barks. She was the protagonist, the voice you're going to be hearing for 99% of the game. And yet, for most of her line delivery, flinging about sci-fi technobabble, she had to stay on her toes and come up with something solid on the spot. That's an absurd level of adaptability, even more so given the fact she did a stellar job.
"It's extraordinarily demanding," Hale adds, and yet she also recalls moments in her career where she was treated like "the utensils on the table." She recounts the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards, wherein she was invited and nominated for a category—but wasn't told until the end that the category winner had already been pre-recorded:
"I waited and waited and waited for my category to be announced. I had a 6-month-old at home who I was still nursing. I really was watching the clock. I finally sought out the stage manager toward the end of the show. He goes, 'What's your category?' And I told him the category. He said, 'Oh, we taped that earlier with the winner.' The dismissiveness of it—definitely I felt that.”
Newbon had a similar experience circa 2012 where, despite having now shared a category with more 'famous' film stars (and winning), his work was similarly disrespected. I'm staggered, but unfortunately not surprised—despite videogames raking in more cash than film and music combined, it's had a history of chronic disrespect. Both towards the games themselves, and the people like Hale and Newbon who bust their arses helping to make them. Good thing no-one's disrespectful to videogame actors nowadays, right? Haha. Ha. Ah, crap.
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