Welcome to the second instalment in the “A Conversation With” article series, where I will be sharing the interviews I have with many of the interesting people in the industries this website focuses on – whether they be voice actor, developer or a stage performer. This interview is with one of the most recognisable voice actors in the industry – Troy Baker – who has contributed their voice to many iconic roles in video games and anime including Kanji Tatasumi in Persona 4, Joel in The Last of Us, Vincent Brooks in Catherine: Full Body, Snow Villiers in Final Fantasy XIII and many, many, many other roles.
So my first question is, so with Supernova being only a week away, are you looking forward to your trip down under and is there anything you’re particularly looking forward to doing or trying while you’re here in Australia?
Oh my gosh. I mean, all of it. Because you guys have chosen to be so far away from the rest of the world, when one finds himself in the auspicious position of being in Australia, then yeah, you want to take advantage of everything you can. However, what my last visit to Australia taught me is that everything in Australia is trying to kill me. So, as adventurous as I like to be, it is always best to go either with a guide or to tread very carefully. Travelling is my number one hobby. I love it. I love exposing myself to different cultures. I love meeting different people. And the thing that I found to do best is to just get lost. It’s to be okay with turning left on a street that you’ve never been down before and just see where it leads.
And especially when you come back to a city, there’s less of the, I’ve got to see this. And I’ve kind of abandoned that whole mentality and perspective because the reality is this, I love Paris. Some people don’t, I do. And the first time that I was in Paris, everybody around me was like, we’ve got to see the Eiffel Tower, got to see Notre Dame, got to the Champs d’Elysees, got to see the Arc de Triomphe, got to do all these things. I knew that I was going to come back because of how I loved the city. Sydney was the same way. When you stand out there in the harbour and you look at, you just taken those sites that you’ve always seen on postcards, but you’re seeing it firsthand. I looked and I was like, I’m going to be back here, so if I don’t see everything right now, that’s okay. I’m going to come back.
And the number one thing that I love, this sounds so cheesy, but it’s the truth. The thing I love most about Sydney are the Aussies. It’s me being a Texas boy and loving that Southern hospitality. There’s just this same kind of charm and laid backness that Australians have. They’re like, you can calm down a little bit. And I honestly feel it’s because you’re just removed from the rest of the world. You’re tapped in and you understand everything that’s going on politically and geopolitically. But there’s still this a little bit like it’s okay, I’m going to be fine, everybody just calm down a little bit. So that’s my speed. So yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing what I see and doing what I do man.
You have provided your voice to so many iconic characters over the years. What has compelled you to, first of all to enter the industry, and then subsequently remain in the industry.
I mean, man, the second that people stop letting me do it I’m going to go find something else to do. But these were the opportunities that were given to me. And I never knew that this is what I wanted to do. I always knew that I was a performer and I always found a way to perform. I thought I was going to light the world on fire with my music, and that’s not what life had planned for me. Now I get to do it as a passion project that doesn’t necessarily need to be my full… I don’t need to sustain my life on it so there’s a little less pressure. I want to see it be successful, but as long as I’m being able to tell stories, that’s all I care about. Whether they be through music games, animation, writing, film, I don’t care. And so whoever gives me a stage to tell a story, I’m going to do that. And at least for right now, that opportunity has been predominantly through the video games that I’ve been able to do.
As a gamer, growing up as a nerd and my brand of nerd being gaming, it’s pretty cool. I get to be a part of making something that I’m going to geek out over later. That’s a pretty good perk of the job, but it’s a very rare one. Most people don’t be like, oh man, I just love accounting. Maths is my thing and I just, that that’s what I would do in my spare time. This is kind of cool that I get to be a part of these games and really find out all of the magic that goes into making a game. And it makes me appreciate them on a completely different level. I’m less critical of games because I understand what it took to… I understand the blood, sweat and tears that went into every game, whether you think that game is great or you got a 60 Metacritic and you understand why. I understand what it takes. Any game that ends up on his shelf is a miracle. Absolute miracle every time. Because sometimes those games should not have been made, but they were.
On the whole video game voice acting angle. So having been in the industry for well over a decade now, from a voice acting approach, is there much different in the processes and approaches taken now to providing voice acting to when you began?
Well, yeah man. I mean we’ve seen, especially when I came into this, performance capture was really just getting up and going. We had had mo-capt before, but really with the advent of Uncharted, we saw a shift in the way that games were made. And I was lucky enough to kind of find a slot that… who you are and what you do is fitting in great into kind of this avenue right here, so why don’t you jump on this train and ride it for as long as you can? But it went from here’s a microphone, you’re in a booth and you’re just going to talk and just interpret these characters as you will, into you go to a sound stage, you suit up, you’ve got 64 cameras in that room that are pointed at you. You’ve got a camera on a helmet six inches from your face and you’re wearing these reflective dots all over your body and you’re jumping over big crates that they’ve built to be sets and they build you a Jeep that’s actually like a Jeep or a motorcycle that you can move around on.
And you’re interacting with your other actors just as if you were doing, it’s like the perfect marriage. My wife calls it stage on film. It’s the perfect marriage between that black box theatre and a true cinematic performance. And that’s because the level of immersion in games has gotten so deep that they’re like movies that you play. But I’ll say this man, we’ve been going through, Nolan North and I just started doing this thing on YouTube because why not do something on the internet, everybody else is. And we started doing this show called Retro Replay and we’re going back through, and Nolan’s never been a gamer. And so I’m introducing him to all of these old retro titles. This last episode we just put out was Ninja Gaiden, which I haven’t played in forever. Or we did even stuff like classic Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. We did, what else have we done? Spider man on Atari 2600 about broke Nolan’s brain.
And games were so hard and there was this, you got the cartridge, you put it in your console if it was your Atari or your NES or whatever. And there’s no manual necessarily other than here’s a really cool backstory that you’re probably never going to read. There’s no tutorialization, it was just figure it out. And games were hard and primarily because there was no… Games didn’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and it wasn’t the fifth or sixth iteration. There was one that they did, it took six months to make, it probably cost a hundred grand, if that, with marketing. And if it flopped, it flopped. There was going to be the people who were going to buy it, the people that were never going to hear about it and that was it. There wasn’t all of this complication to it.
And there’s something that’s really, really beautiful, and I’m starting to see games go back to that really simplified version, not just necessarily the 8 bit retro style, but there’s a game that came out last year called Inside. The game started and you were just in it. There was no tutorialization, you figured out that you did this, you push this button and that did this and you just figured it out. It’s a super short game, but man, it was one of my favourite games of last year. And I love it when games challenge me. Rod Serling said, “Never make the mistake that your audience is stupider than you”. And I completely support that. I think that we need to remember that gamers are super, super savvy and that we can be highbrow, we can not necessarily hand everything to them on a silver platter or beat them over the head with instructions. Just let people get lost, let people be frustrated. I think people will be stronger for it.
It was a long answer to your question. I have no idea where we got there.
What sort of advice would you have for those looking to follow in your footsteps? And to voice acting as a career.
Don’t follow my footsteps for God’s sake. Go beyond, blaze your own trail. But I think that there’s a lot of people, and I get to ask this a lot, it’s like, I want to do what you do. And I totally get it because I had those moments too. I was like, this is what I want to do and how do I do this? Because it is an incredibly niche market. It is a very, very challenging thing to do, or at least it was. I think it’s getting more and more broad and as games grow, people that have a proclivity towards being an actor first of all and for an affinity for doing something in that realm, don’t worry about your voice. 90% of the time, well, 70% of the time when somebody hires me for a gig, it’s my voice. They just want me to be me. Delsin Rowe in Infamous Second Son is my voice. Rhys in Tales from the Borderlands is my voice.
Every once in a while there’s a slight affectation, like we did Sam in Uncharted 4 with Nolan. That’s me trying to do my Boston accent because it rubbed Nolan the wrong way because he’s from new England and I knew it would get under his skin. It’s things like that that I think people can get distracted by, like I’ve got to have this certain voice. No, you don’t. Just have your own voice as an actor. And I’m not talking about the way that you speak. Do you inherently look at the world in a different way and do you interpret your experiences in an emotive way? Can you tell a story? If you can do that, then by God, go out and be an actor and don’t let anybody tell you anything different. But eventually, you will have to do something that requires a lot of work from you.
And I think one of the best ways to learn to get grounded beneath your feet, get involved in theatre. It’ll teach you how to take direction. I’ll teach you how to build a character from the ground up. It’ll teach you some fundamentals that regardless of where you find yourself, whether it’s in a booth or on a sound stage, are going to come in handy. And just working on, I’ve got a really cool voice and I can do the Joker, that’s not going to get you very far. If they happen to be looking for your breed of Joker, great. But they very rarely are doing that and people need to make a living at it. So more than anything, instead of trying to come up with a cool voice, just really work on your own. That’s what I would tell people.
If you had the chance to step into the shoes of any character from any format you have ever voiced and live out a week in their life, who would it be?
Holy crap. What a great… With no consequences on the other side?
Correct, no consequences
Dude, the Joker. I know that makes me sound like an absolute psychopath, but if there was no consequences, it was kind of a dream state and you get to do whatever you want, who wouldn’t want to be that guy? Just for a little bit. And I say that and then there were times when we would leave a session, and I was that dude for four hours in a sitting, and I felt weird. Amanda Wyatt who was our director on that, our performance director, she would be like, “Do you need to go? You need to go away right now.” It’s just, you have to be creepy when you do that and it’s… so maybe not. Maybe I wouldn’t be that guy for a week. I know for a fact I wouldn’t want to be Joel. Not for a whole week. That guy’s heavy, way too heavy. I don’t know, man. That’s a really good question. Because typically I play very tortured characters and I don’t know if I personally would want to be them for a week.
I know you’ve covered this a little bit, but what do you think of video games as a storytelling medium compared against other formats?
I think they’re the best version of that. I love to read and nothing will ever replace a book for me. And when I read a book, I create my interpretation and my own version of that world that will inherently be vastly different than the author’s intention. But I’m reading it at the pace and in the linear way that the author had planned. He knows where that or she knows where that chapter ends. And I’m at their mercy with the pace. I can choose to stop reading, but other than that, that story is going to play out the way that it is. Watching a television show is a very linear observational thing. It may make you feel something and there’s this empathy that happens between myself and characters or sympathy, but there’s nothing like playing a game.
When I have agency and I impact the world. Even if it’s something as stupid as pointing a gun and shooting a window and the designers have made sure that the physics in the world react to my assets that are reflective of the specific weapon that I have at that time so that if I have a machine gun or a shotgun, it’s going to react differently. Or if it’s a baseball bat or if it’s my fists, something that the world responds to me. And when you extrapolate and build upon that so that my choices as a character actually effect the narrative, that to me is, this is where we started off by drawing on cave walls. Video games are the obvious evolution of that. It’s the next metamorphosis of telling a story. Because now I’m putting you inside of it and giving you agency and responsibility with every decision and the outcome of the game. And even VR to me takes it a step above that. It’s just in its embryonic phases right now. But I really think that games as a whole are where we’ve been moving as a culture towards telling stories.
How does it feel playing a game and hearing pretty much yourself take on the role of that character?
Honestly, if I’ve done my job, then I don’t notice it. If I stand out and I go, ha ha, that was me, then I didn’t do something right. Because my job as an actor is to disappear behind that role. And I don’t equate myself to… I’m not Daniel Day Lewis. Daniel Day Lewis completely goes away and there is only the actor or only the character he’s portraying. But there is a level of anonymity that I should make so that whoever’s playing that game doesn’t go, “That’s Troy Baker.” It’s that they see that character, they see Joel, they see Hooker DeWitt, they see these different characters so that I’m not taking them out of the experience, I’m causing them to go deeper into it. That’s all that I want to do. So the same thing applies for me as a gamer. If I go, oh man, sorry, I just got wrapped up in what we were doing, I’ve done my job.
You’ve voiced such a diverse range of characters, how do you kind of approach that to kind of tailor your own style to a particular character.
Well, I mean a lot of that, sure. A lot of that fortunately is I’m not relying just on a voice. The way that so many games are being done now with the performance capture and again, it’s just like shooting a TV show. It’s just like shooting a film. There’s a first AD, there’s hair, makeup and wardrobe, there is a camera department. Scripts are written and sent out before time and we get a full day of rehearsal to walk it through the director and do a whole blocking rehearsal and make sure that we understand what’s happening in the scene. The typical standard stuff you’ll hear every actor say is preparation. And it’s true. But a lot of that also is met with comprehension. I always have really, really long conversations with my director and if I have questions, I’m going to let them know, like, “I don’t understand why we’re doing this.” Everything is born out of conversations.
And typically on a movie, you shoot for anywhere from three, six, eight, 10 weeks, maybe 12 if it’s a really, really big movie. And then you’re done with it, that’s it. You may come back and do pickups, but for the most part, you do the whole bulk of your shooting. On a game, because it’s so iterative, we worked on The Last Of Us, we shot for two and a half years. And on average, we shot once, maybe twice a month. And we would rehearse on Wednesday, shoot Thursday and Friday and that was it. And then we come back in a week and it would be like, okay, so now we’re actually in Bill’s town whereas before we were this. Now this thing has changed. It’s not like a film where you shoot on that location. If a certain part of the movie takes place in Spain in a villa, then you shoot in the villa in Spain and you wrap out that location and you move back to New York or whatever it is.
Games are different. It’s so much about what you inherently know about the character and not so much about externally what is informing you about that character in that world. So I really rely on my director and my own personal process of how I break down a script and how I work through that script in order to prepare me so that when I show up to set, I know my lines, your lines, their lines. I know everything that I can because in order to do my job for me, that’s what I need.
Thank you very much for your time!
Dude, it’s my pleasure. I love talking about this stuff.
It is well overdue, but I would like to thank Troy Baker again for their time, and everyone who made this interview possible. You will be able to hear Troy in their upcoming role of Joel in The Last of Us: Part II next year, or regularly on their Youtube Channel Retro Replay, which they run with fellow voice actor Nolan North.
While Supanova: Pop Culture Expo Sydney and Perth 2018 are now well and truly over by more than a year, there are still two more conventions coming up next month. Those in Adelaide will be able to attend their local event November 1st – 3rd at the Adelaide Showground, while the Brisbane event will be held the week after from November 8th to 10th at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre. Missed your chance in 2019? More events will be held across Australia in 2020.
