Jennifer Hale is well known as one of the most prolific video game voice actors today, with key roles in Metal Gear Solid, BioShock Infinite, Metroid Prime, Overwatch, Star Wars media, a slew of animated series, and in Mass Effect as female Commander Shepard. We were thrilled, then, when Game Rant got the chance to interview her and discuss what it was like narrating the new audiobook To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, along with other insights from her wide-ranging career.
Our questions started out with the audiobook in question, a new offering from Christopher Paolini, author of Eragon. The story is a space-faring adventure, making Hale a perfect fit, but the interview also shifted from the book itself to Hale’s views on strong female characters, the ins and outs of voice acting, sci-fi settings, and the challenges of creativity and learning. Some portions of this transcript have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
GR: What’s the biggest difference between traditional voice acting, video game voice acting, and audio book narration?
Hale: All three of those mediums are different in some pretty definitive ways. I’ll start with the two that I’ve spent the most time with, which is animation and video game voice acting. In animation you get the script ahead of time, which doesn’t always happen in games. In fact, 90% of the time it doesn’t happen, maybe nowadays 85. It used to be 100% of the time. When you’re doing a game you’re cold reading, and in animation you have time to sit with the script a little bit. In animation and games you typically record in four hour blocks, but in animation you’re sharing the load with cast mates.
In games the length of the script is often unknown. It looks a bit like a phone book or two or three stacked on top of each other, and when you come in to work you’re doing what amounts to a four hour one person show, and you’re reading out of context and out of sequence. You don’t always have all context you need to be specific, so you have to make it up and hope that it fits, which is were we rely very heavily on voice directors.
In an audio book- this is my first one, so I can by no means speak like any of my peers who are so amazing and do these all the time. I will say what I experienced and what I know from listening, it’s best not to lean all the way in to a character’s voice, because that can throw the listener off. That being said, in To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, there were a few characters who totally took over my mechanism and- “NOW I TALK LIKE THIS.” They were so clear and they just delivered down a particular lane and it was not coming out any other way. In general I modified the characters to pull them back a little bit.
The work load is incredible, I have phenomenal respect for people who read audiobooks. Just the intensity of reading out loud all the way through. I don’t know how the experienced people do it, but I would read the book and stay 70 or 90 pages ahead so it would stay fresh in my head and I wouldn’t accidentally or energetically foreshadow anything, but still knew enough to get through the day of recording.
GR: That’s an interesting tactic, to keep yourself from knowing what happens to certain characters.
Hale: There are certain things where I was like ‘ohhh boy,’ I better hook that in, let me pick up those lines for that character. But it was also, I have this crazy stack- I’ll show you my voice memos on my phone…. Those are my references for all the different characters. There are over 50 of them, and they’d go away and then come back a hundred pages later, or I’d be like ‘Oh! They’re back! What?’ They would just show up or have a line or two, but they have to sound the same, so that’s how I chose to keep it consistent. Again I don’t know what the experts do ’cause I’m new here to this field.
I feel quite spoiled I have to say, because I was not allowed to watch cartoons as a kid, and the very first cartoon I auditioned for was Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego. It was a perfectly gender balanced cast, it was ethnically mixed every week, it was educational content- it was extraordinary…. I feel just as spoiled on this audio book, having never done one, and having this be my first. It was a challenging experience, but it was also a really extraordinarily privileged one.
GR: How do you find the voice for a character?
Hale: It’s in the writing. Every single time, it’s in the writing. If it’s not I would go to Callum (the voice director) because he and Christopher (the author) had discussed it very extensively. But almost every single character was clear as a bell; they are written very, very well. I find that in almost all my work: it’s there on the page. Quite often, if I think of animation, there are a million different directions to go and the hard part is narrowing it down and picking one.
GR: Is there ever an individual detail that cements it for you?
Hale: Colloquial expressions can be fantastic. I won’t say the expletive now, but ‘blank on a stick’ or something like that. Or the rhythm of the speech. One of the characters in this book, the rhythm of his speech was super clear. It made him feel wide-eyed and ready to go regardless of his background or situation. The rhythm of the words, idiomatic expressions, those are very, very useful.
GR: You’ve said in the past that as a VA for games you try to disappear and let the player be the star. Is it the opposite for an audiobook?
Hale: In an audiobook, the way I approached it is that I do disappear and the story is the star. I didn’t inject my opinion, I inserted my emotion as little as possible. It’s a fine line between experiencing the book and sharing it. If I’m just experiencing the book there’s not a lot of room for the listener to experience it because it’s all about me, and I do not want that.
GR: When listening, it did feel like the narration voice almost disappeared and characters would come out very clearly. How do you switch between characters and narration, back and forth?
Hale: Once the character voice is clear, it’s a pretty straightforward switch because there’s always a key. For some of them there’s a single line. For Vishal, this one character, ‘your core temperature.’ Just the phrase ‘your core temperature’ would take me right there. And for another one ‘you have family on Weiland, you have family on Weiland.’ That would take me right into her. I can’t repeat Sparrow’s out loud. Everyone has a key line, some people in animation use that term. Quite often in the beginning I’d just get out my voice memos and play a reference. One of the aliens, there’s a certain way they speak with a lot of repetition- that’s all I’ll reveal on that, but I’d just hear two words and go ‘okay, I’m there.’ That’s where the editors and engineers in this particular format are heroes, because man, the volume you have to go through! Thank you! Thank you so much, I owe you a beer!
GR: This might be seeing a pattern where there isn’t one in a prolific career, but you’ve done Star Wars, you’ve done Metroid, Mass Effect, and now this. Is there something that draws you to space settings with adventurous, interstellar stuff?
Hale: I think sci-fi appears a lot because it’s place to play and imagine our future as what we’d like it to be, and that always a good place to go play.
GR: I want to ask this to someone who has played almost entirely female characters: What do you think is the sign of a good female character? Or what makes a good character, period?
Hale: When they’ll work regardless of their gender, there’s your cue. When they’re just a human being. Because the minute you put that gender label on them you create a limitation. If you use it like a character choice, like a life choice, a person who has retreated into their particular brand of femininity for safety or for power- that’s a specific choice and a very complex being. But then it’s a human being making that choice. My current wish is that the industry at all levels, at the level of writers to producers to directors, casting people, all levels of creators: when it comes to casting who’s in your project, unless a character is specifically referring to their anatomy or their hometown, please remove all gender and ethnicity from your labeling, because it opens everything up to everyone. That goes for abilities as well. Why in the world is that any different?
GR: That would have been the follow up question- is it because it’s often a female character before it’s just a character?
Hale: Yeah, I mean, we could get into a whole conversation about the patriarchy. The fear that comes out of that, and the power and control that it was designed to achieve. We’ve all lost half of the power in the world by eliminating the feminine. As the feminine comes in to power, my hope is that it will not eliminate the masculine, but I don’t think it will. There’s enough space on the boat for everybody and everybody is needed on the boat.
GR: You talked about disappearing into a role, but as you’ve become more well known, sometimes people are really looking forward to hearing you in things. For example, with Mortal Kombat 11, fans weren’t just excited to have a cool villain in Kronica, they were excited that it was Jennifer Hale voicing her. Does that change the role at all? How does that feel?
Hale: I don’t think it changes a thing because I wasn’t aware of it. *laugh* I actually don’t pay attention to that because if I do it becomes about me and not the project. It’s about the beautiful idea that the writer birthed, and the vision that everyone else on the team sweated to make happen. But that’s exciting and cool to hear! I’d have tweeted more if I’d known about that! Although I never know when to tweet because I just assume everything is NDA forever.
GR: Do you have a role that you really enjoyed but you think isn’t well known or is underappreciated?
Hale: That’s a tough question to answer because I don’t focus on that part of it, I don’t think a lot about what people think of my work because that makes it about me.
GR: To rephrase it, is there a role that you’re particularly proud of?
Hale: Oh my gosh! I’m really grateful for the amount of diversity I’ve been able to have, and still have, in my career. There’s a project coming in about a year and I’m so crazy excited about it but I can’t say anything. I will say that it accesses a piece of my vocal range and a piece of my spirit that I haven’t used in the past few years, but it’s a huge part of me and I’m super excited about it. The diversity is huge for me, having been the voice of Cinderella for so long is a huge honor, and also FemShep because breaking that glass ceiling was everything. It was gonna be broken, and I’m super honored that I got to be- I am deeply honored that I got to be the ink in that pen. And there’s more work to do.
GR: What was your favorite part of working on To Sleep in a Sea of Stars?
Hale: It was a really good story! And, it was a really cool experience because Christopher contacted me directly to see if I was interested. I had met him a few years ago in Australia and he’d mentioned something about it in passing, and now I know this is what he was talking about. It’s always cool when someone follows through on an idea like that, and I love the book. Loved it. It’s deep in my consciousness, embedded in my lexicon.
GR: Who’s your favorite character?
Hale: Ooooh! The narrator of course!
Kira. I think she’s amazing. The journey she goes through is extraordinary. For me I found a lot of deep meaning in where the story goes and how it goes there. It’s such a walk of life, it’s a path that so many of us go through and it channels some of the larger lessons of the universe in a beautiful way.
GR: Was there anyone who was just fun to do the voice for?
Hale: Hah! Sparrow! Sparrow is so fun, she literally took over my voicebox. Trigg, Trigg was another one that took over my being. To get all those words out as fast as he thinks was quite something. I grew to really love them all so much. They’re in my heart.
GR: In the book is there anything you’re really proud of that people should be listening for?
Hale: I am proud that I made it through those appendices. Oh my god, there’s some deep science there and I just got on for the ride and tried not to fall off. I had a little fun with the glossary- I chose to do the glossary as an AI. Wouldn’t that be fun? Not as a terribly futuristic AI but as a retro AI, and there are some- I don’t want to give anything away. One of my favorite parts of the book, there are sequences where Kira has something happen to her, and it’s becoming a deep piece of her that communicates with her when she sleeps. There was a vocal tone that took on, and I really enjoyed being in that zone. There was something kind of magical about that space.
There were four specific moments near the end where I had to stop because I was just choked up. I could not talk, the writing just got me and I had to take a second. This book opened up some really cool downloads. Those moments where the universe reveals something super big picture that’s amazing. This book really opened up a few of those for me.
GR: That’s a stunning endorsement. Is there anything you can talk about that you’re really excited for moving forward?
Hale: I’m really excited for people to discover this book and dive into this universe, to really live this experience. It’s awesome, it’s fun, and I’m really excited to share it. I’m a little anxious because I’ve never done one of these before.
Other than that, I released a song during the middle of this whole thing (the ongoing pandemic). Somehow I got inspired in the middle of this and I came out with a song that I recorded. I started out as a songwriter when I was extremely young, and last year recorded some stuff. With the change in our realities it got shelved, but somewhere along the way I decided to pull it out, dust it off, shoot a picture here in this booth and just put it out. The song is called Never.
GR: Anything else you wanted to talk about?
Hale: Let me think on that. I love this format. It took me by surprise. I really, really loved it. I have huge respect for people to do it because it takes a lot to sit here for hours and hours and hours talking the whole time. But I loved doing it and I hope I get to do it again. I’m excited for what this universe of To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is going to bring into our sci-fi world, and to our fictional playground.
GR: Given the chance, would you do another audio book?
Hale: I would do another in a hot second. I unexpectedly loved it. Even though it’s a daunting pile when you look at 880 pages plus appendices.
GR: Right, and you can’t just skim the appendices if you’re narrating.
Hale: You can’t! And the listeners don’t get to skim it either unless they boost the speed. I’d be interested to hear what that sounds like, but I don’t know if I’ll go back and listen. Every time I go back and listen to my own work I end up just wanting to do it again because I’ve thought of six other things I could do a little bit better. It’s a little maddening. I think that’s the path of the growing and learning. We’re on it our whole life. I want to find a new way to look back on work, because I don’t want to look back and say ‘that should have been better,’ I want to look back at it and go ‘cool, that’s what got me here.’
You know it’s funny, creativity, for all of us- I don’t care what you’re doing- I don’t care if you’re a banker, or a visual artist, or a comedian, or a writer, or a journalist, or an actor, or a songwriter, they’re all acts of creation and they all invoke that little kid part of us. One of the tools I’ve learned to survive in this is that I separate my creative side from my adult side. You’re two people. You’re the artist or the creative self that creates, and they get to just go without criticism or judgement and just do the thing. And then you’re the grownup who is the benefactor, pays the rent, and makes it all happen, takes the critiques in and brings it all forward to the next level.
[End.]
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is available in audiobook and print formats.
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