LogFAQs > #879971772

Miroku_of_Nite1 posted...

SusanGreenEyes posted...

Lynda Carter was the voice actress for Azura in Skyrim:
http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Voice_Actors

She was in Fallout 4 as well. But you know why right?

Her husband Robert A. Altman is the CEO of ZeniMax Media, parent company of publisher Bethesda Softworks.

But how do you explain the other somewhat washed up actors they got to fill roles? They can't ALL be married to Zenimax execs!

Or for that matter, why, when Max von Sydow apparently died halfway through recording lines for Skyrim, they got someone terrible at mimicking his voice to do the other half of his dialogue instead of replacing him entirely, thus making his character something of an abomination?

Honestly, nothing about Lynda Carter's voice-acting screams nepotism to me (even if there was a bit involved), because she IS an actress, and she HAS acted fairly regularly for years, almost entirely in roles her husband had absolutely no influence over. People WILL recognize her, which in turn means she has just about as much "celebrity factor" as a lot of other "celebrity" voices in games.

And Lynda's torch song singing as Magnolia was pretty good, honestly, so I'm fine with her voicing the character.

If game companies are going to keep hiring ex-Battlestar Galactica actors or Firefly actors to voice roles because they loved those shows, or hiring "legitimate" actors to do roles in the hopes of name recognition giving them a bit of a rub respectability-wise (see also, Patrick Stewart., Max von Sydow, etc), I don't really have a problem with an exec pulling strings to get a spouse or family member or friend or whatever a job as long as they can actually DO that job.

Because honestly, I'd love it if they'd passed on, say, Joan Allen, Terence Stamp, or half-zombie Max von Sydow (even though I love Terence Stamp and Max von Sydow as actors in general) in favor of someone who actually seems like they want to be in the recording booth and know what they're doing. Hearing a bored, dispassionate voice putting stress on the wrong words and acting like they have no idea what's going on doesn't win me over, even if it's a voice I recognize from other, better things that I may also have enjoyed. I'll almost ALWAYS take professional voice-actors over "celebrities", because stage and screen actors tend to put out very poor vocal-only performances, especially if they don't give a shit about the work.

(This isn't universal, of course - Mark Hamill's a fantastic voice-actor, and there are any number of other actors who seem to put in the extra effort and produce strong vocal performances in games or animation. I'm not really criticizing Sean Bean or Christopher Plummer, for example. But execs definitely seem to think that name recognition trumps performance, which I strongly disagree with.)


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