acting | Polygamer

Sarah Elmaleh is an actor and voiceover artist best known for her work in video games, including indie titles Gone Home, Read Only Memories, and Pyre, to AAA titles Final Fantasy XV, Gears 5, and Anthem. Her credits also include radio dramas and on-screen performances such as Hey Ash Whatcha Playin’?. Last year saw the debut of GameDev.World, an online game developers’ conference that Sarah co-founded and co-organized. She has most recently appeared in Night Studios’ Afterparty, released last month for the Nintendo Switch, and as the voice casting and director for The Red Lantern, coming later this year.

In this podcast interview, I ask Sarah whether it was by accident or design that she found herself in this niche career; the tools a voice actor employs in the absence of makeup, costume, or lighting; how she got into character to play Apollyon, the sister of Satan; how the experience is different working in indie games vs. AAA; which of her characters she’d like to play in a live-action movie; the ways in which GameDev.World complements GDC, and how the pandemic has affected both events; and why Mark Hamill is a great actor.

Stream the audio edition of this interview below or from iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Overcast, Pandora, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive. Click past the jump for links to resources mentioned in this episode.

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Tristan D. Lalla is a star of stage, screen, and game. His video game voice-acting portfolio includes Far Cry 2, Deus Ex Human Evolution, Rainbow Six: Siege — and, most notably, the slave-turned-pirate Adéwale in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and its sequels and DLC. But both Tristan and Adéwale had to grow into their roles: Tristan overcome both a speech disorder and shyness to become an actor, and Adéwale was originally from Martinique until Tristan invested his Trinidadian heritage into the character.

In this interview, Tristan shares family and teachers helped him overcome his personal challenges and become an actor; how a stage actor broke into the video game industry, and how being a gamer himself informs his performances; what it’s like to be motion-captured into a game and then to play a game that he’s in; the importance of representation in games, even when gamers can’t see the voice actors; whether directors should take an actor’s personal history and experiences into consideration when casting; and why video games should tackle difficult topics such as slavery.

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Podcast: Download (Duration: 57:09 — 27.0MB) | Embed

Tag Archives: acting

Polygamer #100: Voice actor Sarah Elmaleh

Polygamer #52: Assassin’s Creed voice actor Tristan D. Lalla