ACTORS GIVE VOICE TO VIDEO GAMES BUT FEEL INVISIBLE
Even the most famous don’t get treated like TV or movie stars
LOS ANGELES» She woke up with a tickle in her throat. This was worrying for Ashly Burch, who, at 27, is a rising star in the small world of voice actors, best known for her work in video games. She knew actors who had blown out their voices in the studio. She’d come close herself. So leaving her house that morning Burch sipped a soothing mix of chai tea and pea milk. “It’s nondairy,” she said. “Dairy creates mucus and that’s not a good sound.”
Now, standing inside a soundproof studio in nearby Santa Monica, she gave no hint of discomfort as she prepared to record new lines for “Horizon Zero Dawn,” one of the year’s most popular new releases.
“How’s your throat?” the director asked.
“Fine,” she said, as a monitor glowed with her lines.
Voice actors are increasingly on the front line of a transformation taking hold in the entertainment industry as the creativity of Hollywood and the technological innovation of Silicon Valley converge. Voice, that intimate marker of human emotion, is now seen as essential to the $24.5 billion U.S. videogame market, where the hyper-realistic graphics and operatic storylines used in games that can be as textured as the best film dramas. And the best voice actors — their names known to fans and promoted by companies — can become celebrities despite never appearing onscreen.
Yet voice actors in this industry are not treated like actors in television and movies. This led voice actors to go on strike last year against 11 of the largest video game developers over bonus pay and safety issues such as vocal stress. The bitter labor dispute dragged on for 11 months, making it the longest strike in the history of Hollywood’s largest actors’ union SAG-AFTRA. Burch was forced to give up a critically acclaimed role she loved. Gaming fans feared delays for their favorite titles before a tentative deal was reached late last month. A vote by the full union is going on now.
The lengthy strike highlighted how video games have emerged as the scene of a tense clash between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Voice actors want to be treated more like TV and film actors, who are viewed as central to the creative process. Tech firms often see the developers and engineers as the true stars of the show.
“They keep saying, ‘Games are different,’ ” said J.B. Blanc, a wellknown voice actor and director who has worked with Burch several times. “But that’s no longer true. Because games want to be movies and movies want to be games. These are basically 100-hour-long movies.”
A couple days before her Horizon
Zero Dawn session, Burch was at the Cartoon Network offices in Burbank to record voices for the new cartoon “OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes.” Jobs like this helped Burch and other voice actors stay afloat as the strike dragged on and auditions for video games disappeared.
Another voice actor on the show, Courtenay Taylor, mentioned she suffered a hemorrhage in her vocal cords last year while voicing a game. Most injuries come from extertion, such as screaming. But she got hurt whispering. She had to visit a speech pathologist for rehab and was unable to work for three months.
“I can show you some pretty gnarly pictures, if you want,” Taylor said, offering to share photos of her damaged vocal cords.
Other actors said they’ve tasted blood in their throats during prolonged sessions. One actor fainted during an audition after screaming for too long.
The nature of video games makes it difficult work. Many games feature characters dying or crying out in agony. An actor is needed to make each of those sounds. Burch once worked on a military-themed game that required her to shout all of her lines for four hours straight.
Last year, the union invited California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health to investigate what it called unsafe and vocally stressful conditions for actors doing video games. Before regulators declined to take action, the union played them a recording of an actor doing a typical “death scream.”
“They couldn’t believe we were screaming like that for four hours at a time,” said Keythe Farley, a voice actor.
Even the calmer, story-driven games require lots of dialogue because they contain dozens of hours of scripted play.
“That’s the weird thing about vocal stress,” said Kate Flannery, another “OK K.O.” voice actor, best known for on-screen roles in shows like “The Office.” “You push yourself to do these voices because you want to be easy to work with. And that’s where you get hurt. There’s a people-pleasing aspect that doesn’t happen when you’re [on-screen] acting.”
“Here,” Flannery added, “it’s all about your voice.”