Laura Bailey was excited. By this point, she had already been in a bunch of anime, but this was the first time she had landed a commercial gig. The only problem was that an unwelcome passenger was along for the ride; a huge zit right in the middle of her forehead. It was the kind that draws the eye when people talk to you – you see their focus drift up to settle on the monster mound peering over your brow, almost as if they’re communicating with the pimple itself.
“I get in the makeup chair and they’re looking at me,” Bailey laughs. “They’re like, ‘This thing is huge. What did you do?’ They’re lighting me and I’m sitting there for a very long time. Everybody’s looking at me, then back to the camera, and they’re all whispering back and forth. And finally, the director just throws his hands up and goes, ‘I cannot work like this!’ It was mortifying.”
This wasn’t the only embarrassing day at work in Bailey’s early career. During one audition, a famous actor threw snacks up in the air and caught them in his mouth while she performed her sides, totally uninterested in what she was doing. And it’s not as if these kinds of moments stopped when she became better known. When she took a part on Star Wars Battlefront, it wasn’t until she got on the performance capture stage that she realized her character was some gangly alien. “I have never done anything like that,” Bailey says. “I don’t do creature noises or monsters. They were like, ‘Okay, now you have to do this strange walk.’ And I had this weird voice that was being processed.”
Image credit: Heirlume Photography
These aren’t the kinds of situations you’d expect someone voted “most congenial” in her senior year of high school to get into. Back in her school days, Bailey wanted to be a biologist because she was fascinated by how everything alive is connected on a molecular level. But Bailey herself wasn’t as connected to her classmates. At lunchtime, she’d tuck herself away in the science lab and eat alone.
In her freshman years, she auditioned for a part in a play. While she didn’t get the role, the person who did praised her audition, and that led Bailey on a path towards pursuing acting as a career. Through her time at a theatre department in a local community college in Dallas, she eventually landed an agent and her first voice acting gigs at Funimation, which handled the English dubs for Dragon Ball Z and other anime.
“They didn’t have a very large pool of actors yet,” Bailey remembers. “So I just lucked out. One of the guys who was in the show with me was also an actor there and he said, ‘You know, I would like you to come in and audition.’ I got to work there for a very long time.”
Bailey’s IMDb page is like staring down Route 66. It scrolls forever and features almost 500 credits for acting roles at the time of writing. Bailey – one of the hardest working performers in video games and anime – will probably have added three more before I finish this sentence.
Image credit: Robyn Von Swank
Her first video game role was Bloodrayne, in which she played a half-vampire with fiery hair and a hatred for bloodsuckers. “I go back and listen to earlier stuff and it’s so terrible,” Bailey says, cringing. “How did I get the job? I didn’t even know how to make the battle reactions.”
At one point while recording for Bloodrayne, the game director put a sword in Bailey’s hands and told her to physically swing it in the recording booth to assist her effort noises. She smacked the microphone. “Learning,” she says. “It’s all learning.”
Around the same time, she worked on Deus Ex: Invisible War, providing the feminine voice for protagonist Alex Denton. This role taught her more about how video games work, since the game featured dialogue choices and branching paths that allow the player to shape the protagonist’s personality. In no other medium do you need to create a character that’s simultaneously consistent and different for every member of the audience.
Deus Ex was an outlier at the time. Not for its branching dialogue systems, but because it let players choose to be a strong woman, which was a rarity in games back then. Many of the games that featured women in lead roles often sexualized them, as anyone who lived through the PS1 Tomb Raider days can attest to.
“Bloodrayne had a Playboy spread,” Bailey explains. “And when we were doing a lot of the reaction noises for her, they wanted it to sound slightly sexual in nature. Yeah, and, um, that’s just the way it was then. I didn’t even bat an eye. It didn’t even occur to me that maybe things should change.
“It wasn’t until after I’d come out to California around 2010. I lived next door to Troy Baker – he’s one of my best friends – and I was sitting in his kitchen. I can’t remember what he was working on, but it was some awesome project, and I was playing a girlfriend or wife character, I can’t remember. I was talking to him about how it was hard because he always got to go out for these really awesome roles and I was always going out for the girlfriend role. He didn’t even understand. Like, he had never seen it from that perspective. It’s so cool now to see, just ten years later, how different it has become.”
Moving to LA from Dallas was a big shock for Bailey. Back in Texas, she’d worked steadily for years, landing gig after gig at animation studios. In LA, nobody cared. It was as if she had to start from scratch again. “I couldn’t get in the door with any studio,” she says. “I did a session with Liam O’Brien, who was directing an anime at the time, and I had been recommended to him. I come in the door he’s like, ‘I still don’t feel comfortable. I don’t know who you are, you can be blah blah in the show’. Even though I’d played the lead in all these other ones, he didn’t know that. So it was a whole process of proving myself again.”
Her big break came with a role in Final Fantasy 13 as the protagonist’s sister, Serah Farron. Bailey has always been a big fan of the long-running JRPG series, and landing the part felt like she had finally made it in the City of Angels, where acting dreams often go to die.
Since then, Bailey – who is now independently successful, too, thanks to her part in the Critical Role show – has landed some huge video game credits. Perhaps the most high-profile among these is her turn as Abby in The Last of Us Part 2. The character didn’t appear in the first game, but she marked her entrance into the series in one of the most jaw-dropping sequences in video game history, killing the protagonist of the original game with a golf club. The story initially follows Ellie, who’s looking to get revenge – but just as you close in on Abby at the halfway point in the story, the timeline shifts back to the start and you’re placed in control of her instead. You learn why she did what she did, and you come to empathize with her. Bailey’s performance, which takes the player from hatred to admiration, is astounding.
Unfortunately, some of the story leaked online ahead of launch. Seeing these events unfold outside of the context of the game made a toxic portion of the fandom seethe with unfounded rage. Bailey is still dealing with the fallout years later.
“That was a rough period of time,” Bailey says. “It was right as COVID was hitting. That happened and then the game leaked early. Fans were reacting to these very horrific moments within the game without any of the build-up to it. It created the worst storm that could have happened. I talked to Neil Druckmann, I talked to Ashley Johnson. I talked about it. And I just kind of backed away from the Internet for a while. There was a lot of stuff that came up about that scene and just a lot of degrading messages that came my way. I still see the remnants of it online. You know, pretty much anything I post, there’s going to be one person that puts something up about that game.”
It hit harder not just because of the bile people were spouting, but because Bailey had a real connection with the character. Once she settled into the role – which director Neil Druckmann originally didn’t want to go to her because she’d just played a major character in Uncharted 4 – both Druckmann and Halley Gross began writing the character around Bailey, to better match her take on Abby.
“When I first went into the audition and callback for it, the notes he was giving me were very different from the notes he was giving me towards the end of the game. When I was first reading for her, he kept reminding me, she doesn’t smile. Because that’s just my go-to – I smile, even when I’m uncomfortable,” Bailey says, smiling and instantly making me paranoid. “He’s like, ‘That’s not Abby. It should feel like a reward if she’s smiling.’ And it stuck with me. But then by the end, I don’t think I thought about that all the time – it was just like, she was who she was.”
Another thing Bailey had to take into account was Abby’s frame. Abby’s body double is CrossFit athlete Colleen Fotsch, who could absolutely bench press you. Bailey started going to the gym more so she could get a sense of how this commitment to working out would impact the way someone carries themselves. But then something happened – Bailey fell pregnant.
“I was fully pregnant through the filming of that game,” she laughs. “You walk differently when you’re pregnant. So the whole time on the stage, it was a conscious thing in my head of, ‘Oh, I have to walk. I’m not pregnant right now.’”
For certain portions of the game, one of her scene partners was Ashly Burch, who was playing Mel, a pregnant character. So here’s Laura Bailey, actually pregnant and pretending not to be, opposite Ashly Burch, who isn’t actually pregnant but is wearing a fake belly bump and doing her best to pretend she is. She also got to work alongside Troy Baker, her old next-door neighbor – the man who, ten years ago, didn’t consider how games needed more strong women in major roles. And here she was, standing over him with a golf club.
“Troy is genuinely one of the best people you can be in a scene with as he is really giving as an actor,” Bailey says. “He’ll always bring something new. He makes sure you feel a connection with him. And in having the relationship that I do with him, there is so much more going on than just the dialogue that’s happening. When we were filming that scene between Abby and Joel, we were connecting with each other, making sure that both of us were good when it was happening. It was hard to shoot that scene, but we were checking in with each other between every take.”
Bailey tries to forget herself when she’s playing characters. She’s Mary Jane, she’s Abby – the real Bailey slips away. When she’s cast as a character, she thinks about them beyond the page, contemplating the things they like, the things they hate, their pasts, and their secrets – anything that’s not written down but fleshes out her understanding of the character in her mind. One of the things that has helped with this process is her involvement in Critical Role, a series in which she and other prominent actors play Dungeons & Dragons on camera and in character.
“Having worked on Critical Role for so long, every single week we’re living in another person,” Bailey explains. “So we’re embodying this character over and over and over again. It has made it so much easier to just drop into a character. Through Critical Role, my acting in other projects has gotten so much stronger just because it makes it easier to tap into the emotions. You have to be able to just shift into gear so fast. We’ll start a game where we had left off on this really emotional moment – somebody has died after some big traumatic moment – and you have to instantly, after this dorky introduction, shift into, ‘Oh, ****, I’m crying again.’”
For the team behind Critical Role, it couldn’t have worked out more perfectly. When the pandemic began, video games ground to a halt for a while. It was near-impossible to move forward with performance capture due to social distancing measures and a lot of actors were short of work. It wasn’t even as if they could fill their time with convention appearances either. Fortunately, Critical Role and its animated series Vox Machina have had massive crowdfunding success, allowing this group of actors to take their fate into their own hands with something they co-own.
“We started to record the first couple episodes together and then everything shifted to backup, homebrew setups,” Bailey says. “But it’s great because we’re all executive producers, as well as the cast of the show. Having the capability to record from our house, when we’re doing pickups or whatever – you can watch the episode go, ‘I don’t like my performance, we’re gonna redo it. I’m gonna redo this line and this line and just send it in.’ It’s great to have that creative control.”
Bailey is finally in charge of who gets to see her when she has an inconvenient zit, and that’s beautiful.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
