If you are waiting for an actor to arrive at Technicolor Digital Productions in Burbank, California, there is a strong possibility that you will not hear him or her coming. In the past few years, the voice work for hundreds of video games and animated features has been recorded within 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 wearing a long-sleeved cotton shirt and black jeans. “If you’re wearing nylon, forget it,” she told me. “You’re naked in five minutes.”
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. (Stanford 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.”
Hale is in her late thirties, with long, thick dark-brown hair that has faint almond highlights. In Technicolor’s corporate Day-Glo precincts, she cuts an incongruous figure, projecting a pleasant, outdoorsy effect that stopped just short of hippie. She loves hiking, rock climbing, and riding horses. She openly deplored my consumption of diet soda, and eventually persuaded me to quit for a month and to report my findings. I soon found that Hale had never played any video games herself. “I have so little free time,” she said with a shrug, explaining that she preferred to spend what free time she did have outdoors, in the “dirt.”
Hale was at Technicolor to record dialogue for BioWare’s Mass Effect 3, a sprawling science-fiction game whose first two installments sold more than five million copies. In the new game, which will be released in the spring of 2012, Hale reprises the role of Commander Shepard. Shepard is the character the player controls, and quite a bit of dialogue is assigned to her. This was Hale’s second recording session for Mass Effect 3, and it was to last four hours and cover several sections of the game. During the next few months, she had at least twenty further Mass Effect 3 sessions to look forward to.
The Mass Effect games are, by and large, written before they are animated—an unusual sequence in game development but the norm at BioWare. The script’s emphasis on dialogue and decision gives the game experience an unusual narrative richness; writing for the New Yorker, Nicholson Baker praised Mass Effect 2 for its “novelistic” quality. The script for the first Mass Effect ran to 300,000 words; the second to 370,000. (By comparison, a typical English translation of War and Peace has around half a million words.)
We walked past the doors of several mix rooms. In one, an audio engineer was sitting at a brightly lit soundboard while an actor performed on the other side of a large window, urgently gesticulating but inaudible. In another, Hale introduced me to Caroline Livingston, Mass Effect 3’s voice-over producer and director; Mac Walters, its lead writer; and David Walsh, a Technicolor audio engineer. Livingston asked Hale if she wanted anything to drink. Hale requested a glass of water—if possible, not in a plastic glass. “I’m nursing,” she said. “I may not have a clean system, but I’d like to give one to my son.”
Talk quickly turned to the earthquake-spawned tsunami that had, the day before, devastated northern Japan. “I’ll be surprised if L.A. doesn’t have a quake in the next two months,” Hale said, and proceeded to speak knowledgeably about the tectonic interrelatedness of New Zealand, Japan, and California. She then described coming home one night some years ago in Los Angeles, and how “the smell of skunk was so pervasive it actually burned my nose going into my house.” Once inside, she said, “I just got the willies; I couldn’t get comfortable.” A few hours later, the 1994 earthquake hit. She had been able to sense the quake, she believed, because she had been in “a place of stillness. I think animals feel earthquakes because they’re so quiet. They’re connected to the earth and not bombarded by the Internet.” Hearing a prominent video-game actor share these thoughts moments before a recording session was rather like watching the College of Cardinals debate the merits of atheism while electing a new pope.
Walters told Hale that he wanted to show her a recently completed cinematic from Mass Effect 3, the dialogue for which Hale had recorded only a few weeks before. Also known as “cut scenes,” cinematics are potted narrative segments that contain little, if any, gameplay. In the cinematic, Shepard was shown speaking to the representatives of some interstellar admiralty. The music that would underlay the scene was not yet in place and the game’s lightning system was still not functioning, one result of which was a pronounced dramatic sterility. Hale’s performance as Shepard, however, was taut and forceful. “Is this a big, pivotal moment?” Hale asked, concerned by the seeming disconnect.
Walters explained to her what she was not seeing. “It’s rough,” he admitted, “but it’s good to see it.”
“It’s great to see it,” Hale said. “It really helps.”
Hale left for the recording booth, a ten-by-ten room, with gray carpet and gray ceiling and gray sound-absorbent padding on the walls. BioWare records its game dialogue in Los Angeles, Edmonton, and London, but every word of dialogue used in its games is recorded in the same conditions and with the same peerlessly sensitive equipment. When Hale drank from her ceramic cup of water, her front tooth struck the cup’s rim with a resonant ching. Hale readied herself, the booth’s track lighting lending her face a glossy ivory glow. A microphone anchored in a shock mount was arranged to hang just below her eye level. The two most important technical considerations when working with such a microphone are to maintain one’s “mike distance” and try to keep from “popping” one’s consonants. Shielding the mike was a circular and darkly translucent windscreen, which minimized any plosive miscalculations.
A few minutes into the session, Hale was asked to vocalize the noises the player would hear when he or she pressed a button to make Shepard sprint. While making these noises, Hale had to avoid moving and keep her mike distance. I had heard versions of this sound probably hundreds of times while playing Mass Effect. Hale, standing perfectly still, softly huffed and puffed into the microphone. When I closed my eyes, I could see Shepard running.
At the beginning of Mass Effect, the player must choose a gender for Shepard. If one opts for a female Shepard (FemShep, to the game’s fans), Hale performs her. If one opts for a male Shepard (BroShep), Mark Meer, a Canadian actor, performs him. According to BioWare, 80 percent of players select BroShep, a statistic that is regarded as something of a tragedy by the gaming intelligentsia. Kirk Hamilton, the games editor for the magazine Paste, told me, “It’s always been hard for me to communicate to people just how much Hale’s performance improves the experience of Mass Effect. She works at a slow burn; each pause and inflection accumulates over time until you can’t help but care for the character she’s playing.”
“It’s certainly very frustrating to hear Shepard spoken of primarily as a man,” Hale told me. She attributed the situation to how society perceives women in leadership positions. It probably hasn’t helped that all the Mass Effect promotional material thus far, including the game box, has featured images of a male Shepard—a thoroughly generic space-marine lunkhead. At one point in Mass Effect 2, BioWare hints at an admission that FemShep has been grossly shortchanged: a teammate mentions that Shepard was used as a poster girl for military recruitment, but she did not test well among focus groups and was replaced with a composite figure.
As the game progresses, players make further decisions about Shepard. Shepard can react to other characters with relative kindness (the “Paragon” option), behave with hard-charging recklessness (“Renegade”), or take a nameless, middle-of-the-road approach. How the player decides what to say and do is governed by what BioWare calls the “paraphrase system,” a clever (and patented) in-game user interface system that presents the player with an array of paraphrastic summaries (“I’m honored,” “This is unexpected,” “This is a terrible idea”). Once the player picks a paraphrase, Shepard speaks accordingly (“I’ll do everything in my power to help you,” “It would have been helpful to know about this earlier,” “I’m not a lawyer!”), and the conversation continues. In most cases, when the player selects a paraphrase, one or more avenues of discussion are closed off in order to maintain conversational consistency. This means that even someone playing as FemShep will require several playthroughs to hear all of Hale’s recorded performance.
If one of the secrets of successful stage and film acting is seeming to be unwatched—also known, absurdly, as “looking natural”—the secret to Hale’s video-game acting may be disguising the fact that she is reading lines first seen only minutes beforehand and for which she has been given comparatively little context. A film or television actor knows where her character begins and where her character ends up, which allows her to create the illusion of dramatic momentum even if something is filmed out of sequence. Hale works off a much narrower store of available information. Frequently, all she has to go on is the copy in front of her and the scene-setting description provided by writers and producers. She works not from a text but from text.
As she prepared to record one scene, Hale wanted to know whether she could insert into her performance sighs and other off-script inflections. “We can’t do that,” Walters said, “because there’s two of you.” FemShep’s and BroShep’s lines, though separate, have to match because both Shepards share the same interlocutors. Going off script, even slightly, can alter the intended tone of an exchange.
“I always forget that!” Hale said. “There should only be one!” She laughed, and apologized, and laughed again. She asked how much ambient noise would be added to the scene.
“Lots,” Livingstone said. “There’s a sandstorm.”
To manage Mass Effect 3’s script, BioWare was using a new system, called VADA, or Voice and Dialogue Editor and Recorder. (“The acronym doesn’t match for reasons I can’t even begin to get into,” Livingstone told me. My guess: a more easily harvested acronym that VADA would be VADER, a trademark registered by LucasFilm.) The system is paperless and allows for scenes to be called up instantly, by file name. On the master VADA screen, which Hale could not see, all the game’s scenes were listed as file names. Walsh used a trackball to navigate through the scene list, controlling the recording process via his computer keyboard. As Hale spoke, Walsh’s fingers moved as though he were playing a tiny, silent piano. Meanwhile, in the booth, Hale was reading off a wireless iPad-like tablet. Her lines—attributed to PLAYER: MALE & FEMALE—appeared in clusters, with the line she was supposed to perform enlarged into bold, thirty-point type. There were stage directions, too, or “cinematic comment,” in VADA speak: “This is NOT casual conversation”; “This is a fairly intimate conversation. Normal intensity.” The cinematic comment was there to provide Hale with additional bits of context. Hale later confessed to missing the paper-based dialogue system used during Mass Effect 1 and 2, which allowed her more freedom to “flip ahead and read as much as I can.”
Livingstone told me that Hale’s “secret” was to do three or four and sometimes five highly variant takes of a single line reading in a row. “Jennifer could do seventeen thousand readings and they’ll all be completely different,” Livingstone said. “And we can use them all. They all could work.” Hale finished and Livingstone gave her verdict: Take Two was an “alt” and Four was a “keeper.” Every alt and keeper was made part of the VADA scene library and could be summoned with a keystroke for playback.
Michael Abbott, a professor of theater at Wabash College and proprietor of the influential gaming blog brainygamer.com, told me, “You’d expect players to be tired of hearing Jennifer Hale’s voice after dozens of games, but she’s made herself untraceable. She’s played everything from a love-struck English schoolgirl to a stoic battle-tested soldier. She’s a chameleon. It helps that she has a knack for making exposition and technical language sound like dinner conversation.”
I noticed that when Hale performed as Shepard, her lush, dulcet speaking voice hardened, somehow, as though edged in concrete. “Shepard’s a military person,” Hale told me later. “Military people do not get what they want by being emotional.” Indeed, during the session Hale stopped herself a few times because she knew she had gone “too emotional.” It was not merely Shepard’s martial bearing that constrained Hale. Because of the non-linearity of the dialogue, she had to be vigilant about letting feeling from one line spill over into another. Hale performed with an intensity that she could, apparently, summon at will. She seemed to immerse herself, often looking around manaically, her teeth bared in primate agitation. Then as the context of a new line was explained to her, she would pace, picking at a cuticle or rubbing her arms or looking intently at her screen.
The loneliness of acting in a booth, with no one to respond to, can be difficult. “It has to be all in my head,” Hale told me. “Environment, ambient noise, history with this person, what I need from this person, what I want from this person—all these decisions have to be made on the fly, in the moment, as quickly as possible.”
Quite often, before Hale would do her takes, Livingstone would say something like, “Okay, you’ve just finished a big fight.” Other contextual phrases Hale was fed to color her takes included “professional,” “romantic,” “combat,” “intimate, not romantic,” “not romantic,” “distance,” “before combat,” “walking” (also known as “walk-and-talk”), “exertion,” and “after combat.” Sometimes Hale was not always able to recall the space-opera particulars of the Mass Effect universe. When the criminal organization Cerberus was mentioned in one exchange, Hale paused to ask, “Is this the first time I’ve heard of Cerberus?” Walters, without missing a beat, reminded Hale that Shepard spent the entirety of the previous Mass Effect in Cerberus’s employ. Hale later maintained that she was asking if this was the first time Shepard had heard of Cerberus in Mass Effect 3, but I wasn’t so sure. Either way, it was like hearing Tom Hanks ask, “Which one is Woody again?” in a Toy Story 3 outtake.
Hale was born in Labrador in 1972, and holds dual Canadian-American citizenship. She grew up mostly in the American South. Her mother, who died four years ago, was what Hale called “a wandering master’s degree pursuer” who eventually settled on a career in epidemiology. Hale’s biological father is an outdoorsman and intellectual (“He’d be really pissed if he heard me call him an intellectual”) who still lives in Labrador. The man who Hale says “has been my dad most of my life,” and who was married to Hale’s mother for five years, is a semi-retired microbiologist and researcher for the Gates Foundation. Based on this, one might imagine Hale’s childhood as a procession of bookish family dinners, cheerily contested Trivial Pursuit games, and bedtime stories starring friendly prokaryotes. In reality, Hale told me, “I had, probably, a more challenging experience growing up than most middle-class chicks.”
She got on well with her stepfather but did not get to know her biological father until she was in her twenties, and her relationship with her mother was a difficult one. “She was in a lot of emotional pain,” Hale told me. “When you’re a kid, you don’t know that. You just know someone’s screaming at you, and flailing at you and kicking you around mentally and emotionally.” Hale’s mother told young Jennifer that she was half Native American; that she was born so premature that she nearly died; that she was descended from the Pilgrims at Plymouth. None of this was true, but it may have helped prepare Hale for a lifetime of pretending to be other people. Hale now thinks that her mother’s prevarications must have been a way to assuage her crippling sense of inferiority.
One of Hale’s first acting roles was when, as a teenager in Birmingham, Alabama, she was asked to perform voice-over on the radio and paid thirty-five dollars for her trouble. “For talking,” she said. “For talking! I was out of my mind.” Hale believes that one of the reasons she was hired for the job was that her mother had discouraged her from speaking with a Southern accent. She went on to study acting at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and Birmingham Southern College, but found that the latter’s program did not suit her. “The style was broader than what I was interested in doing,” she told me. “I wanted something more filmic.” Hale eventually got a degree in business. Her explanation: “You gotta eat.”
Amazingly, when she auditioned for her first film—an NBC movie of the week—she booked the part. After other roles, she was selected, out of six thousand aspirants, during a nationwide search conducted by the soap opera Santa Barbara. “At the time I wore giant T-shirts and baggy pants and there were some seriously hot girls in this line. I was like, ‘How did this happen?’ ” Hale did a couple episodes of Santa Barbara. After that, she worked steadily as a regional actor, but in search of “a bigger game to play” made the inevitable move to Los Angeles.
In the nineties, Hale made the rounds on shows that reliably cycled through young actors—Melrose Place, ER, Charmed—but after two years of this she was desperate for more stable and lucrative work. She told me, “I thought, Well, I’ll just take voice-over and see if I can make some money there.” A month later, she had landed her first cartoon series, Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? To the best of Hale’s recollection, she had, at that point, never seen a cartoon in her life. She struggled, initially, with the unfamiliar demands of cartoon voice-over and enrolled in a cartoon acting class, where she learned how to “bring a tiny being to life” and travel “so far away from my physical self and stretch my voice to a different place.”
It was through Carmen Sandiego that Hale first discovered video-game acting. The cartoon spawned a video-game spinoff, and Hale was brought in to record for it. She was startled by the disassociated, scattershot approach of the process, as when she was asked to record dozens of geographical factoids. “We’re doing how many flags?” she remembers thinking. “I have to say the name of how many countries? How is this going to be used?” She shrugged. “I didn’t get it.”
From there, Hale moved comfortably into commercial voice-over—a field that, when she was starting out, was dominated by men. She begged her agent to give scripts specifically written for male actors and, to her agent’s surprise, began booking those roles, too. Nowadays, Hale noted happily, “it’s mostly women you hear narrating commercials.” When I asked Hale if she felt similarly proud of having broken into action video games, probably the most male-oriented voice-over field of all, she smiled. “I like to take the boys’ jobs,” she said.
For years, many of the “actors” corralled for video-game voice-over were game developers themselves, and the results were predictably indifferent. One of the first game franchises to pioneer the use of high-profile film and television actors in video games was Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto, though in the last few years Rockstar has moved in the opposite direction, hiring relatively unknown talent for prominent roles. Michael Hollick’s Niko Bellic in Grand Theft Auto IV and Rob Wiethoff’s John Marston in Red Dead Redemption are generally ranked among the finest video-game performances to date, and the performances are extraordinary, in part, due to the unfamiliarity of the actors’ voices. Overexposure is thus a pressing concern for video-game actors, and Hale spoke several times of her worries that, one day, her voice might be thought too recognizable.
The voice-over community is, by acting standards, an unusually cordial one. Hale’s friend Nolan North, who portrays Nathan Drake in the Uncharted franchise and is possibly the most recognizable male voice in video games today, enthused about the nature of the community. “It’s not filled with jealousy,” he said, “and we go head-to-head for jobs. We’re never mad at each other for getting something.” North believes that this collegiality is a by-product of the invisibility of video-game actors in the culture at large. “If you’re talented and a handful, there’s no place for you,” he said. “The people who do well in voice-over are the people who are genuine. Everybody makes the same amount of money, too. There’s not the disparity of income you see in other areas of acting.”
“We’re paid a flat fee,” Hale told me. “We get no percentage of any kind. That fee is based on union scale. If you’re very lucky you can get over scale.” A few years ago, she said, she was paid 1,200 dollars for a game that made 270 million. I asked if that was at all galling, but she deflected my question, pointing out that game developers “do all the front-end work, and they do all the back-end work.”
David Hayter, a friend of Hale’s who portrays Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid franchise, is rumored to have been paid more for the role than the industry average, though he would not comment on that. A successful screenwriter whose credits include X-Men and Watchmen, Hayter is so deeply associated with Snake that it has become, effectively, his only role. Apart from those projects that his “twelve-year-old self couldn’t say no to”—he recently agreed to play a Jedi in a LucasArts game, for instance—Hayter has more or less given up video-game acting, which makes him slightly more willing to discuss the ways in which game actors are paid and, arguably, underpaid. “The video-game industry is actively trying not to go the ways of movies, with residuals and things like that,” Hayter told me. “If you starred in a movie that made $250 million,” he said, “you’d get more for your next movie. That doesn’t happen in games. You get, maybe, double scale.” But then, video-game actors lease out a smaller portion of their essence than film actors: voices, after all, are more interchangeable than faces.
Toward the end of her day at the studio, Hale came to a scene with a character referred to as A/K. It was the most emotional scene of the day, and also one of the most technically tricky, because of the way that player’s choices in Mass Effect 1 and 2 carry over into the new sequel. A/K refers to two characters, Ashley and Kaiden, both of whom are Shepard’s teammates in Mass Effect 1 (and, depending on Shepard’s gender, potential love interests). Near the end of that game, however, the player is forced to save one character and sacrifice the other, and, in Mass Effect 2, whichever of the two was saved reappears to remonstrate with him or her. The result of that conversation, which can go a few ways, determines how the script-merged but game-distinct character of A/K will interact with Shepard in Mass Effect 3.
The scene Hale was about to perform involved Shepard’s reaction to A/K being harmed. The first line of the scene was simple enough: “Let her/him go.” But Hale had to say it multiple times, with different emphases, in order to communicate every possible state of alarm with which Shepard would regard the sight of A/K in peril. Hale did her customary four takes of “Let her go,” which she followed with four takes of “Let him go.” Two were growly, hateful takes, and two were hard, urgent takes. When she finished, Hale flexed to indicate her deepening transformation into Shepard. She was then told that her lines had to be recorded as though she were running.
“I have a question,” Hale said. “It’s pretty emotional for Shepard here. How big do you want it?”
Walters explained that he wanted Shepard to seem like more of “a real character” in this game, a character who showed “his frailty.” At Walters’s use of the masculine pronoun for Shepard, Hale smiled. “I want Shepard’s vulnerability to come out,” Walters went on, “even though not every player will choose to experience it.”
“Is Shepard sick of fighting?” Hale asked.
Walters winced in slight equivocation. When recording with Mark Meer, they had tried to communicate a war-weary Shepard, Walters said. “But we got feedback that the male Shepard sounded whiny.”
Hale went through the “Let her/him go” process again, recording five takes this time.
“I’ll take Five as the keeper,” Livingstone said, “and Four as a back up.”
Hale’s next line was “No!” Livingstone turned to Walters and asked, “Is this a panicked ‘No,’ or an angry ‘No’?”
“It’s a”—Walters hesitated—“futile ‘No.’ ”
Hale nodded. “No!” she said, stirringly, a moment later.
“More compassion,” Livingstone said. “Less heightened.”
Hale tried again, and her “No!” seemed to emerge from some alarmed, half-strangled place in her throat.
By the end of the session, Hale had completed twenty-seven scenes and run through 220 lines of dialogue. When I asked Livingstone how many scenes the game contained in total, she answered, “Hundreds.” Livingstone would sit through most recording sessions. How much time would that amount to? I asked, suddenly concerned for her. “I don’t know,” she said, looking away. “Eight hours a day for three months. How long is that?” Over 1,200 hours. Hale would get off easier, but by the time Mass Effect 3’s voice production wraps, she will have spent more than three hundred hours portraying Shepard.
Before Hale could stop for the day, she had to perform one last virtuoso task: Shepard’s grunts and pain noises. She was given direction for a pain noise to indicate she had been shot once, a pain noise to indicate she had been hit with a burst of energy, a pain noise to indicate she had been shot while moving, a pain noise to indicate she had been punched, a pain noise to indicate she was nearing death, and a pain noise to indicate she had died.
I decided that I couldn’t leave Los Angeles without playing Mass Effect 2 with Commander Shepard herself. Hale, after some hedging, agreed to try and came to the house where I was staying. A screen came up asking us to select the male or female Shepard. “Are you kidding me?” Hale said, choosing the latter. A load screen came up, and Hale passed the time by excitedly tapping her feet against the hardwood floor. She looked over at me. “Is my head going to explode?”
During her interactions with other characters, I asked Hale whether she would play as the Paragon Shepard or Renegade Shepard. “I’m going to go with the middle-of-the-road Shepard,” she said. “I want to hear my middle responses, because they’re the hardest to land. Filling them with energy and emotion takes a lot of focus.”
Upon hearing her first spoken words in the game—“The distress beacon is ready for launch”—Hale groaned. “Drives me nuts,” she said. “I could have made that better.” When the opening cinematic gave way to actual gameplay, Hale looked helplessly at her controller. She tried, vainly, to move Shepard forward. “Wait,” she said. “What am I missing? The right what moves me?”
“The right stick moves the camera,” I said. “The left stick moves you.”
She had somehow positioned the in-game camera in its least obliging position. “I’m looking at my own tush,” Hale said. Soon she had Shepard running through the hallways of her spaceship as it came under devastating attack. Hale leaned forward to turn up the volume, so as to better hear Shepard’s breathing. Something in her eyes changed, and she began to nod. “This,” she said, “is actually really informative.”
We watched the eerie scene in which Shepard is sucked out of an airlock and into the soundlessness of space, the only sound her increasingly labored breathing as her frantic, thrashing limbs gradually relax into death. Hale sat back. “I remember recording this vividly. It’s really fun to die specifically.”
In the game, of course, Shepard is swiftly resurrected. Soon, Hale had her first taste of combat. She struggled with learning how to take cover, shoot, move while shooting, climb over cover, reload, and find ammunition, all the while keeping the camera centered in front of her. But when the game required Hale to find a grenade launcher and dispatch a platoon of hapless robots, she did so quickly and efficiently. “Handled it!” she said, in a tight, confident voice. It was, I realized, Shepard’s voice. The game soon brought Hale into contact with a character called Jacob, yet another of Shepard’s potential love interests. During Shepard and Jacob’s conversation, Hale mined the paraphrase system to get as much information—and hear as much of her performance—as she could. At one point in the conversation, Hale cringed. “There’s a segue error there,” she said. “The energy in the transition was wrong.” I pointed out that she could hardly control that. This was true, Hale said, but “I need to have that information somewhere.”
After an hour so, she indicated that she was ready to stop playing. But I realized that the next sequence would bring Shepard into her first contact with a character known as the Illusive Man, who is played by Martin Sheen—an actor she had never met. “We should really keep going until you have your conversation with Martin Sheen,” I said.
Hale perked up. “I should always have my conversation with Martin Sheen. He’s my favorite president.”
During the interaction with the Illusive Man, Hale pursued every available line of conversation possible. When the Illusive Man, at last, dismissed Shepard, Hale put the controller down and stared at it. It seemed unlikely that she would be picking up another controller anytime soon.
“So how did that feel?” I asked.
It was helpful, she said, but beyond gaining a basic understanding of what playing games is like, she felt surprisingly unaltered. Or maybe that was not so surprising. “I’m used to living in a disassociated universe,” she said.
—2011