Do it or don't do it: there's no trying when you're an actor directing a game like Star Wars Outlaws.
First, it's Star Wars, a franchise whose most ardent fans wage daily battles over the series' legacy, often at the expense of the talent involved. The actual work—the motion capture, the voice work, the weaving of acting into gameplay—is isolating, and an actor can only hope to deliver enough soul to the digital artists who will play a playable character in its entirety. And then the hype for the “first open-world Star Wars game” raises the stakes.
None of this made Humberly González bat an eyelid when she landed the role of Kay Vess in Ubisoft's AAA store.
“I didn't put pressure on myself thinking it was Star Wars. It didn't scare me,” González tells Polygon, one September morning from the North Carolina set of his new Netflix series. The seafront. “I felt like this is the kind of project that would bring up potentially different conversations that could be polarizing, but at the end of the day, there aren't many opportunities for Latinas to lead a Star Wars project. “I felt very proud.”
The 32-year-old Venezuelan actor has spent the last decade acting in screen projects big and small, from Netflix Jupiter's Legacy and Ginny and Georgia to lead Friends and family ChristmasHallmark's first lesbian Christmas romance, and being the target of a murderous supernatural entity in last summer's film. tarot. But Star Wars Outlaws was he This job, says González, is “the great opportunity for me to show what I can do after the last nine years of my career.”
In any case, “Star Wars was the icing on the cake” of a bigger dream: to be the protagonist of a video game.
Image: Mass Entertainment/Ubisoft
When she landed the role of rebel Kay Vess, González already had several Ubisoft games under her belt, including roles in Starlink: Battle for Atlas, Very far away 6and Avatar: Pandora's Borders. González's experience in mocap goes back even further than professional jobs: she was a true student of the art of gaming performance.
During his third year at the National Theater School of Canada in Montreal, González participated in a workshop with Ubisoft in which students had the opportunity to perform in a motion capture volume and perform on camera rigs. “We would wear the costumes and make fun of themes from other games like Splinter Cell and things like that,” he says. “When I found out this was part of the job, I thought: I love this. I am a very physical person. I love theater. I love how creative it was to not have to rely on anything but my imagination. And I've always been that kind of actor who doesn't need much to dive in and believe that something is happening in front of me.”
Despite all its stealth missions, sabacc tournaments, and decadent food minigames, Star Wars Outlaws It relies on González's performance as Kay Vess to make it more of a character-driven adventure than a typical open-world experience. And although the first missions fulfill the promise of the “Han Solo simulator,” González wanted to move away from imitating Harrison Ford's roguish precedent. Unlike Han in the original trilogy, Kay is alone, turns to crime, and is shot from her home in Canto Bight after a heist goes wrong. González saw potential in deviating from the archetype: she wanted to play that classic scoundrel, but as a rookie. I wanted to be fierce, but defensive. Kay takes risks, but is vulnerable.
While the game of Outlaws It would require the hero to level up and gain skills; In González's mind, evolution was part of a survivor's journey, complete with a reconciliation of the past. As bounty hunters pursue Kay across the galaxy, so do the memories (and current exploits) of a mother who trained her in the art of thievery.
“She just has the ability to adapt and make mistakes, but not make it her demise,” González says. “She's relatable in the sense that she could be any normal person. It could really be you or me or whoever plays the game; She doesn't have the Force. She doesn't have the skill to take on the biggest and baddest in the galaxy, but her resilience and bravery get her there, and she's not afraid to keep going even if she fails.”
Image: Mass Entertainment/Ubisoft
None of this was clear when González auditioned for Star Wars Outlaws because, during five months of scene reads and chemistry conducted over Zoom, he never knew he was auditioning for a Star Wars play. “I thought I was auditioning for western world!” González talks about the pages of generic space cowboy material he tore up during the rigorous research process. And only when he read with Jay Rincón, the actor who inhabited Kay's ND-5 droid cohort, did he know that the marathon was for Outlawsand Ubisoft wanted it for Kay.
Gonzalez believes his “it” factor was simply his “natural self.” When Ubisoft finally revealed Kay, she felt perfectly aligned from the start. “It's hard for an actor not to stick with a role until you cast it,” he says, “but I really felt like this was me and this was for me.”
Star Wars takes place in a galaxy far, far away, but González instantly connected with Kay as a Venezuelan who left her own country at a young age. “Kay has these abandonment problems and she is alone and as if excluded from the rest of the world, she feels that things are rigged against her… I think about the political turmoil in my country, I think about the distance I feel from my family and the fact that I always wanted more for myself. How do you make it so that when you grew up with nothing, you can actually make ends meet? My family grew up in extreme poverty and we were the first to emigrate and leave. It was an unknown and scary world out there, where I didn't even know English when I left. So there was a lot of risk. “There was a lot of facing your fears, the resilience that comes from upbringing, standing up for yourself in a place where you really only had yourself.”
The Latina experience gave González a foundation in the Star Wars universe, and her life as an outspoken and proud queer woman overshadowed her. While the game may not be a love story, González believes that her own performance and the work of writer Nikki Foy give Kay an implicit queer identity. As she says: “If you feel it, it's accurate.
“I think everyone is definitely waking up to the fact that she knows Selo. [the speeder mechanic] and she is all structured and nervous and that energy affects her,” says González. “Even with Vail [the bounty hunter] — there is energy there too. It doesn't need to be obvious, but if you realize, isn't it just human behavior? “It’s relationships, it’s energy.”
When González left Venezuela – “starting over, betting on myself to be an actor, not having my family in the country, not having anyone but myself” – he finally found safety in his shih tzu bichon frize, Oreo. . He is absolutely, González says, the Nix to his Kay. “It's literally me and my dog everywhere I go,” he says. “I've had him for 14 years, so that relationship connects.”
An actor has never won an Oscar or an Emmy for playing a character in a Star Wars saga, but few have had more than 17 hours (and about 11,376 lines) to forge their characters between lightsaber duels and laser shots. . (And that's not counting future DLC, which González is still working on, at the North Carolina studios.) This year's Game Awards could rectify the franchise's lack of acting prestige, if González follows suit. Jedi: survivorCameron Monaghan enters the performance category and actually takes a win. There's honor there, for an actor who doesn't see video games as a stepping stone to great work, but as a path in which great work can be done. Even with the sheer volume of animation required to bring Kay to life, Gonzalez knows the intense level of effort required to appear and participate in a game, and says it has changed her live performance for the better.
“The only thing I have to focus on is my own performance,” he says. “At the end of the day, they look for all those nuances. We did a lot of facial scans. There is even a process [that lasts] For hours it was me just reading a sentence or listening to an emotion about how to read the sentence. And we did it with all the possible emotions to be able to calculate all the micromovements in Kay's face. And that was such a vigorous process that we spent hours working out every possible move so the animators had options. But my goal is to tell the story and make sure it is as compelling as any other story I have told in my career.”