Lae’zel is a lot of things—a proud warrior of Vlaakith, a fierce combatant, and a genuinely impressive character, able to grapple with her faith and still come out determined to do things the right way. Turns out, her voice actor shares that determination.
In a recent interview with ReadyAimFire, Devora Wilde tells two understandably-astonished interviewers that she was recording voicelines for the character “two days” before giving birth.
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“At the beginning it was fine but towards the end I was getting like, a bit ‘oof’,” Wilde says, in what must be the understatement of the century. “95% of the time you’d be in the suit, and so by the end I’d have to have a little chair [so I could] between the lines go and have a little sit down.
“It was getting towards the end, and they were like, ‘Are you sure you wanna come in?’ And I said, ‘Guys I’m gonna be here right up until the due date, just you watch’.”
Wilde goes on to say that this wasn’t some nefarious pressure on Larian’s behalf, she was just determined to get the job done. “Nobody was pressuring me to, they were like, ‘You can leave whenever you want’, but I was like, ‘Guys I feel fine, why would I [go]? Let’s hit the ground running now!'”
At the time, another (less important) due date was coming—the release of Baldur’s Gate 3: “This was coming up to May 2023, the game was due out in August. So I knew like, ‘The game has to come out, come on guys, we need to get on it!’
“It was coming up to that week where I was about to give birth, and I was still coming into the studio, and I was like ‘see you tomorrow!’ and they were like ‘maybe!’ and I was like ‘haha!’ And then my waters broke after the session,” you’d think that’d gently encourage Wilde out of the recording booth and into the hospital, but she adds:
“I said to my husband, well, I feel alright, maybe I can go in tomorrow! And he went, ‘You’re absolutely not going in … I think now’s probably not the time.’ … I was still very much in denial of the fact that I had to like, push a human being out”.
Hypothetically-speaking, Lae’zel as a character wouldn’t get pregnant: Gith lay eggs, and hand-pick who goes to a creche in the Prime Material Plane (time moves differently in the Astral Plane, where the Gith typically live) to do so.
However, the determination of being about to create new life and going ‘yeah, I could probably record more voicelines’? That all checks out for a character who pretty much came out fully-formed as the stubborn badass she is.
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