When Nathan Fillion says you're disposable, it tends to stick with you.
For voice actor Jen Taylor, that moment came when Fillion, star of Firefly and basically geek culture's handsome older brother, dropped by her hometown of Seattle to record a few cameo lines for what would soon become 2007's best-selling video game, Halo 3.
The Halo series may take place on alien worlds, but it's created in an alternate dimension, one in which, for now, Hollywood stars have the bit parts and little-known voice actors are the stars. And in Halo's quadrant of this universe, one of the biggest stars of all is Taylor. Most days she is a charmingly sarcastic stage actor, but a few times a year she creates the voice of Halo's enigmatic digital muse, Cortana.
As one of Cortana's millions of fans, Fillion didn't miss his chance to chat up Taylor, though he left her with a lingering piece of cautionary advice: Don't get comfortable.
"Nathan Fillion said to me, 'If you don't do one of these games, fans are going to be upset, but they're still going to buy the game,'" Taylor recalls. "There's only so much footing that you have as a voice actor. I don't know if it's because you don't see us physically or what."
To put Halo's success — and Taylor's low public profile — in context, think of it this way: She is the most frequently recurring and plot-central actor in a franchise that has earned well over $3 billion, an amount equal to the combined global box office sales for the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
But Fillion is right. She, along with each of her hard-working peers in the competitive world of video game voice acting, is disposable. They have no cultural cachet, no star power to lend. They have become the new generation of entertainment stars, yet they remain largely unknown, uncelebrated and uncompensated for the global success of their work.
And most dangerously, their universe seems to be colliding with another reality: one in which Hollywood A-listers claim all the good seats at the table, leaving even less of what little money there had been to go around.
In an industry where annual sales have doubled over the past decade and blockbuster games are expected to bring in $1 billion each, the top video game voice actors are still paid by the hour for the time they spend in a recording studio, and that's it. No big bonuses. No percentages of sales. None of the "residual" payments that can make other acting gigs, even 30-second TV commercials, so lucrative over time.
"Someone asked me if I get paid residuals," Taylor says. She half-laughs, half-sighs at the question. "I'd never have to work another day in my life."
The best voice talents in the industry are lucky if they can negotiate an hourly fee that's twice the minimum wage guaranteed by their unions. (Voice actors are essentially paid $200 an hour to do up to three video game voices, while a TV commercial voice-acting gig would pay the same actor a minimum of $300 an hour, a bonus of $1,000 or more if the ad airs nationally and online, and offer them additional payments called residuals if the ad keeps running for a long time.)
Meanwhile, more and more game developers are giving the key roles to Hollywood stars for considerably larger sums, eating up budget and parts that could go to professional game actors.
That leaves many wondering if video games could go the way of big-budget animated films, which have sidelined voice and stage actors alike ever since Robin Williams hammed it up as the genie in Disney's 1992 Aladdin. Can you name the actor who voiced Ariel in 1989's The Little Mermaid? Almost surely not. It was soprano Jodi Benson. She's also a video game actor.
