‘There Isn’t Much Sway Held by Past Success’: Baldur’s Gate 3 actors reveal it hasn’t boosted their careers
‘There Isn’t Much Sway Held by Past Success’: Baldur’s Gate 3 actors reveal it hasn’t boosted their careers | VGC
You can‘t deny it did boost Jennifer English‘s career to a high degree. You could say it‘s not all about her role as Shadowheart alone but it definitely helped kickstart her online presence. She went from voicing children side characters to being one of the most prolific and recognizable voices in gaming within two years and I doubt her role in Expedition 33 where she was heavily featured in promotional material was the last we‘ve heard of her.
Did it?
Checking https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10804818/ and it doesn't look like she became particularly more popular than she was prior to BG3
Which is kind of the point. YOU recognize her and so do a lot of gamers. But... that doesn't translate to getting cast by studios.
This isn’t about me or my perception. I am saying this because she said so herself and the Imdb Page you linked tells the same story. She broke her mold with Shadowheart and now she is getting much bigger and more diverse roles. But feel free to tell me about a game prior to BG3 where she took center stage for marketing like she did for Expedition 33.
I've no doubt she'll continue to do well, but I'm not sure BG3 directly helped her get the role, other than making her voice recognizable to people. I read an article that said that Sandfall did blind voice auditions for E33. They didn't even know they'd chosen Charlie Cox until after the fact.
Yeah, apparently the director and writer of E33 were actually playing BG3 at the time of the casting. But they didn't recognise her voice at all. They just knew that they had found the right one for the role.
It's also saying something that they cast Andy Serkis and didn't use him for performance capture. That was all done before the voice recordings. Recording over already finished performance was an entirely new experience for him.
Agreed, I think it's more that Jennifer English is out there putting in the work to get as many solid gigs as she can, BG3 being just one of several.
She probably did more work on BG3 alone than all previous works combined though. The experience alone boosted their performance immensely. Neil Newbon compared his 4 years at the studio with 4 seasons of shooting a TV show and his role was about the same size as Jennifer‘s. BG3 wasn‘t just any job. Especially not for her. Anyone who actually follows her can attest to that. To say it didn‘t change the trajectory of her life and career takes some serious ignorance.
That's honestly heart breaking, all three gave exceptional performances. I hope in time people will understand the artistic merit in both voice acting and video games as a medium, but these people deserved to skyrocket into their own franchises.
The industry rather wants to hire Troy Baker for every project. Also voice actors, even in animation, rarely get a career boost after a single popular project. Even for live action actors it’s rare. Like how many actors that played in Lost still play in high profile projects.
Lost is a notable exception BECAUSE it’s an exception. The latter half of your comment is nonsense
I mean, the video game industry is about as good as the record industry for its treatment of talent. "You should want to do this for free" seems to be the motto of 8-figure executives.
It's a weird dynamic, but it also makes sense that a success like that isn't as correlated to future work as TV or movies. You got <insert big actor here...I don't know...Tom Cruise> in all sorts of movies because they put asses in seats. The performance is comparatively much more of the appeal in a movie than it is in a game, even a story-driven one. So even if you give an award-winning performance, how important to a game's success is an award-winning performer? For plenty of games, probably not very. And even if it is important for a particular game's success, maybe the award winner is more expensive, and you can get a good performance out of someone who's a great actor but hasn't had that exposure and is willing to do it for less money.
I did two full playthroughs plus a lot of restarts mid-way to try different endings or different side things. The only voice I can clearly hear in my head is the mage, whose name I can't even remember. I can't even remember what my own character's voice sounded like (the vampire).
Tim Downey is Gales' voice actor (the mage), he was also the only one to use his real voice for the role. Astarion's voice acting (the vampire) is very memorable as well (by Neil Newbon), but if you play as any of the characters you barely hear them, or so I've heard.(haven't done it myself)
but if you play as any of the characters you barely hear them, or so I've heard.(haven't done it myself)
This is the case. There are a small set of instances where the character might get a one-off voice line, but in general you're left mute, even during high impact story moments where the character would usually get a spotlight (e.g. Astarion confronting Cazador).
It's just a bit of a shame because you'd think people would opt to play characters they like because they want to experience more of them while playing, but ironically you get less that way.
Okay listen I don't want to sound rude, but I'm not that surprised. Maybe Karlach deserves a bit more recognition but while both Wyll and Halsin were both fine and perfectly adequate, I can't say that either was the kind of memorable performance that gets you tons of new roles. Though it's also in part due to the script and direction of course.
Got to agree. The voice work that really stood out in my opinion was done by Amelia Tyler (narrator) and Devora Wilde (Lae'zel). Everyone else was good and I REALLY enjoyed Karlach. I even did a play through with her as the origin character but it was because of the character design and writing more than the voice acting.
I would add Neil Newbon to the list that really stood out. I thought his acting through the end of Astarion's quest line was the best in the game.
And not because you want to marry Karlach
The game had a huge cast with many memorable characters and moments. Not everyone was going to shine through especially with some fantastic performances like you mentioned.
I think the title of the post is just deceiving and should be changed to the title of the actual article. And perhaps the article title was changed too but it is a more accurate title of the situation.