In the modern age of gaming, especially in RPGs, if you have a character that “stands out” from the crowd, it’ll help your game become iconic. When you look at the best RPGs of the last decade or so, you can not just name the titles but the main characters and why they were special. If we gave you names like Joker, Edelgard, Clive Rosfeld, Karlach, and so on, you’ll know exactly who they are, what game they’re from, and just as important…what they sound like. In the case of Dragon Age, when the franchise was firing on all cylinders, gamers loved just about every character the team made. That goes double for the fan-favorite character, Morrigan.
Her character, including in the recent game, is voiced by Claudia Black. However, if you thought that she was a “natural fit” for the character, you’d be wrong. Series creator David Gaider noted on Bluesky that her rendition of Morrigan was actually panned at first by the higher-ups at Bioware. There were conflicts about “how old she sounded,” and the higher-ups apparently thought that Morrigan should be around 18.
“The first two sessions we asked her to pitch her voice up and it was AWFUL. So Carlone [Livingstone, then VO director] and I did the sneaky thing, and on the third session we asked her to just… act. Use her natural voice. We loved her performance so much we had the feeling that the team would love it too and forget their nonsense. They did.”
Oh, but it gets even wilder. One of the reasons that Gaider was so high on Black was that she truly wanted to be a part of the video game industry, and thus sent a “beat poet rendition” of a rap track that featured Eminem. When he heard it, he “lost it” and knew she had to be on the game.
While he was very happy with her, he almost had a heart attack because of Claudia due to a certain comparison he made:
“Well, when I started writing Morrigan, the voice in my head was Helena Bonham Carter.” She replied, “So what you’re saying is… I’m a very cheap version of Helena Bonham Carter.”
Naturally, the now Dragon Age staple was joking, and she kept bringing up that joke later on:
“For the next several days, whenever she’s in the booth and I make a comment to Caroline – which she can’t hear, because the booth is sound-proof – she’d say, ‘Oh, does he want it more like Helena?’ And I’d melt into the desk in renewed mortification and she’d LAUGH.”
Sometimes, you just get the right person for the job.
