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The New Yorker
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August 15, 2011 Issue

Voicebox 360

The queen of video-game acting.

By Tom Bissell

August 8, 2011

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If you are waiting for an actor at Technicolor Game Sound Services,
in Burbank, California, there is a strong possibility that you will
not hear him coming. In the past few years, the voice work for
hundreds of video games and animated projects has been recorded in
Technicolor's mix rooms, and the first thing any voice-over performer
learns is not to wear noisy clothing. On a recent morning, actors
signed in at the Technicolor reception desk and silently flitted away
toward their assigned mix rooms while I sat in the lobby anticipating
the arrival of Jennifer Hale, whose performances in more than a
hundred and twenty video games have led her colleagues and many
ordinary gamers to regard her as a kind of Meryl Streep of the form.
Hale turned up in an irreproachably silent long-sleeved cotton shirt
and black jeans. "If you're wearing nylon, forget it," she told me.
"You're naked in five minutes."

Jennifer Hale at a voiceover studio in Los Angeles.
Jennifer Hale at a voice-over studio in Los Angeles.Photograph by
Elena Dorfman

To actors, accustomed to the vagaries of a fundamentally insecure
profession, the burgeoning and profitable world of video games
represents a welcome growth area. But the peculiarities of the work
extend well beyond the need for silent attire. Most acting, from
Ibsen to the thirty-second skin-cream ad, is linear. Video games--in
which the variable fortunes of any given player tend to necessitate a
script that is a maze of branching possibilities--often aren't. Most
actors are happiest when they understand their character's
"motivation" and "arc." Video-game actors become skilled at working
with little or no context, and at providing varying inflections for
any line on demand--a practice discouraged by many standard acting
texts. (Sanford Meisner's classic, "On Acting," insists that "the
foundation of acting is the reality of doing," and that "making
readings in order to create variety" is fraudulent.) Strangest of
all, perhaps, for a profession in which one's face is an important
source of one's fortune, video-game actors work in conditions of
near-anonymity. Hale told me that when she drives around Los Angeles
and sees billboards for games she has worked on, she sometimes feels
like "the invisible girl," but she understands that this is a
necessary corollary of voice-over work. "My job," she said, "is to
not exist."

Published in the print edition of the August 15, 2011, issue.
More:ActingActressesCaliforniaDialogueGrand Theft AutoMartin Sheen
Nicholson BakerRecording StudiosTom HanksVideo GamesWomen

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