Jennifer Hale knows firsthand how impactful playing video games can be. Over a video call with viraltrendingcontent, the voice of Commander Shepard recounted a story of one Mass Effect player who first encountered BioWare’s series during physical therapy. “One woman had had a stroke. She was in her early 30s and her physiotherapist said, ‘Pick up a game controller, find a game and use it to learn how to get your fine motor skills back.’ And that’s how she got into Mass Effect.”
Video games can affect our lives in ways that go beyond the controller, like meeting a friend or future spouse playing games online. Hale says they’ve given her a sense of community. She said she has an “incredible privilege” with the way she can interact with the Mass Effect community at conventions and online.
“I don’t use the word ‘fans,’” she said. “I find that I’m very uncomfortable with that, because everyone out there’s the community. You’re the other end of the experience, if you will.” (The “you” there being everyone who’s brought Mass Effect into their lives, either via playthroughs, fanart, cosplay, tattoos, fan meetups, you name it.) “It’s incredible what the game means to them,” Hale said.
Part of the reason Mass Effect has built such a strong following was BioWare’s consideration of inclusivity that Hale called “revolutionary.” Players who only recently got into the series with the remastered trilogy, 2021’s Mass Effect Legendary Edition, might not realize how much discussion spawned from some of the series’ progressive ideas (for their time), like the first game’s same-sex relationship option. “It pissed Fox News off so much, and they couldn’t stop talking about it. And I was like, ‘Well, great. Just get the name right. It’s great for sales,’” Hale said. (New and old players alike should watch Fox News anchors embarrass themselves in this clip from 2008 about Mass Effect and the “‘SE’XBOX.”)
When BioWare dropped the first trailer for Legendary Edition, Hale burst into tears. “Something led me to grab my phone because I just wanted to be with everybody in the Mass Effect community at that moment.” She shared her raw response online, and one comment stuck out to her. “They said, ‘This is what representation looks like.’ And it just hit me.”
“Living my life, living as a… I’m a woman, and I came up at a time when we were quite often second-class citizens,” Hale said, noting that it took until the third game to get FemShep (a version of the character many fans prefer as the canonical one) on the cover of the game. “You just get used to being second-class and you don’t even realize it until somebody puts you in first class and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, this is what it feels like.’ And then suddenly you see everything you’ve been missing.”
Hale also “instantly felt an awareness of where all my representation is and where all these other people aren’t represented. […] This game gave so many people the feeling of being represented. I don’t think you can underestimate that.” It helped, too, that the original Mass Effect trilogy “was just so damn well done.”
Though Hale is intertwined with Mass Effect, she hasn’t played much of the series, or any games, for that matter. “I suck at playing games,” Hale said with a laugh. “All caps. I suck. Long Us, lots of Us.” When Tom Bissell profiled her for The New Yorker in 2011, he “forced” her to play the opening hour of Mass Effect 2.
Playing it “drove me insane,” Hale said, “partly because I was really bad at it,” but also because seeing the game in action gave her loads of context she never had in the recording booth. “85% of the time [voice actors] work cold reading,” Hale explained, meaning most of the time she’ll record without not having read the script first. “We never see a line until we go to record, and we’ll do a couple sets of three, and a little bit of redirection, and then it goes to market.
“So when I played Mass Effect, there was so much more context available to me. I was like, ‘Oh my God, if I’d have known that, I would have added this nuance and that feeling,’” she said. Seeing everything brought to life in the game differently than how she imagined them, like environments and characters, and knowing the newfound context would have influenced her performance “makes me crazy.”
Still, Hale had more context than usual for the Mass Effect series. For some games, “we get the incredible privilege of meeting with leading writers at the launch of the game and the production team. And they give us a briefing on the big picture of the whole thing.” She received a rundown of Mass Effect’s plot, worldbuilding, and character arcs, and an explanation of the branching story paths and dialogue options, “which I thought was cool and adventurous and I loved it.”
Those varying dialogue paths — Paragon and Renegade — influenced Hale’s performance. “When I would record a particular moment in the game, I would record it as neutral and then […] I would just slightly flavor it, just slightly [for the Paragon and Renegade options],” Hale said. “It was very much juggling lots of details in the moment, but that’s what game recording is.” All that juggling makes it so “emotional whiplash is just your day.” Unsurprisingly, recording Renegade Shepard’s lines was more fun for Hale. “I always joke and say Paragon is who I wish I was, and Renegade is what I wish I could say.”
Hale said the team “really hit our stride” recording Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3. “The acting had evolved to a place that’s my favorite kind of acting where you just get to live it. You don’t have to sort of juice the moment at all. You can just be truly as authentic as possible in the acting.”
At one point, that acting became a bit too authentic. Mass Effect 2 features a famously dramatic opening in which Commander Shepard dies in the first few minutes. Shepard drifts in space, away from a devastated Normandy, as their suit begins to leak air. “I made the director insanely uncomfortable in that. It was really fun to watch her squirm as I was dying. It meant I was doing it well,” Hale said. “That was great.”
Hale described a system BioWare used during recordings that would play a scene partner’s lines if they had previously recorded them, “which was a dream.” However, as Shepard, Hale was often the first one to record, so she didn’t get to experience it as much as the game’s other actors.
While recording some of the ending scenes of Mass Effect 3 between Shepard and Captain David Anderson, where the two share a few moments together before Anderson dies from a gunshot wound. “I got to hear [Anderson actor Keith David], and I got to act back and forth with him in that way. And that magic, when you get to have the other actor — even virtually — with you in the moment, it was incredible,” Hale said.
But the scenes with Anderson weren’t the most emotional for Hale. “The goodbye scenes with Garrus pretty much slaughtered me. I had to stop and kind of catch myself for a minute. So I just kept going, ‘Shepard doesn’t cry. Shepard doesn’t cry. Shepard doesn’t cry. Suck it up.’”
The goodbye scenes were as emotional for Hale as they were for players. They were the community’s farewell to a cast of characters they had grown to love over the course of three games. (Until the fan-service-filled Citadel DLC was released a year later and players got to say goodbye all over again.)
Liara is the only confirmed character from the original trilogy to make a return for the next Mass Effect title, though that hasn’t stopped fans from wondering if Shepard will return. Hale said she hasn’t worked on the next Mass Effect, but, “I sure would love to. […] I would love to continue Shepherd’s story if it was what served the universe the best.”
In the meantime, until the next Mass Effect finally does get released, the Mass Effect community will have Mass Effect Legendary Edition to enjoy for the thousandth time. Just don’t expect Hale to play through it any time soon.
