Zelda voice actress Patricia Summersett revealed the inspirations behind her performance inThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, as well as two other games in the long-running franchise. Her insights into the coveted role arrive shortly afterTears of the Kingdomlaunched to immense commercial success, critical acclaim, and fan adoration.
Summersett first played the English voice of Zelda in 2017’sBreath of the Wildbefore reprising that role forHyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, a 2020 spinoff in the vein of theDynasty Warriorsgames. She was onlyconfirmed to be returning forTears of the Kingdoma few weeks ahead of the game’s May 12 release.
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In a newly published interview with Axios, the 41-year-old actress revealed that her Zelda performance was influenced by a multitude of iconic TV and movie characters. More specifically, she said she was inspired by Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen from HBO’sGame of Thrones, as well as Emma Watson’s Hermione Granger from theHarry Pottermovies. Summersett’s Zelda voice also contains “a little bit” of Mia Farrow’s Unicorn fromThe Last Unicorn, the actress revealed.Mia Farrow is an avid gamerand subsequently took to Twitter to share that she was delighted to learn that her 1982 performance inspired this latest rendition of Zelda.
Asked about her experiences bringing threeZeldagames to life, the American-Canadian actress couldn’t reveal much due to standing NDAs. She did, however, confirm that her Nintendo collaborations were always handled by the company’s U.S. branch. Since Summersett was technically part of the English localization teams forTears of the Kingdom,Breath of the Wild, andHyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, she never even got to meetZeldaseries producer Eiji Aonuma.
The actress also wasn’t given any heads-up aboutThe Legend of Zelda:Tears of the Kingdombeing in the works, having only found out about theBreath of the Wildsequel in mid-2019 along with the rest of the fandom. Back then, Nintendo released an E3 teaser for the then-unnamed game which featured no spoken lines but did include a brief glimpse of Zelda.
Summersett, whose game voice acting credits span back to 2007, told Axios that’s a fairly standard industry practice, not least because any given game needs to reach a certain point of completion before its developers can feasibly start recording voice lines. That apparently wasn’t the case in 2019, whenTears of the Kingdomwas still in an early stage of development.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomis available now on Switch.
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