Did you know that the actor who plays the brilliantly horrible Dedra Meero on Star Wars show Andor, Denise Gough, was also the voice of Yennefer in The Witcher 3? Don’t feel too bad if not—it seems like she didn’t know either.
In a new interview, Eurogamer asked her if she knows anything about production on upcoming sequel The Witcher 4. Needless to say, she does not.
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“I don’t know any of this,” she says, looking baffled. “Like I didn’t know what I was doing, I’d never done a videogame before.”
She says she only really became aware of the significance of her role in The Witcher 3 after the fact, when sound engineers on film sets would recognise her voice and ask her if she was Yennefer. “And I was like, ‘who’s Yennefer?'”.
Ironically her Andor co-star Ben Mendelsohn seems more aware of the game series than she does.
It’s not necessarily an unusual situation. Due to the secrecy around major game projects, the often disjointed way dialogue is recorded (sometimes broken up over months or even years), and recordings frequently happening in a different country to where the studio is based, it’s surprisingly common for actors to have very little context for what they’re doing. Their work is often concluded years before a game even releases, too, creating an even bigger gap between them and the finished product.
All of which is to say, I certainly wouldn’t take this as evidence of Gough being unusually unaware or dismissive of the series—and certainly regardless of what she understood about the wider game she was taking part in, her performance in The Witcher 3 was absolutely brilliant. Still, it is quite funny to imagine her recording probably 100 hours of incredibly plot-important dialogue for the game with no clue what all this talk of magic and monsters was about.
This is a trend that seems to be changing, at least. Partly because of games being taken increasingly more seriously as a medium, but also partly because of the rise in the use of motion capture performances rather than actors contributing purely via voice work. It’s hard to imagine the cast of Baldur’s Gate 3 ever forgetting their character’s names, for example.
When it comes to The Witcher 4, it is interesting at least to know that she hasn’t been approached to reprise her role yet (unless this is a clever bluff). Yennefer’s story, like Geralt’s, certainly felt concluded in The Witcher 3—but given her important relationship with Ciri, who’s taking the leading role in the sequel, it’s easy to imagine her playing some kind of role, even if only in flashbacks.
Of course, chances are pretty good that they’re simply not far enough along in development yet to be formally casting roles. The game’s still a long way off yet—it won’t be out until 2027 at the earliest, according to CD Projekt.
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