What Madness Is This
Video game voice acting is tough stuff. Not everyone can pull it off! Which is why it should come as no surprise that big names sometimes don’t mesh with the work. Still, Minnie Driver and Drake are definitely not two names one would associate with the Gears of War franchise. Or video games of any sort, for that matter.
Minnie Driver recently tweeted about the only gig she ever got fired from, and it was Gears 3? Better still, it was all due to how she couldn’t deliver the lines loudly enough to cut through the game’s massive amount of action-y noise. Rod Fergusson, the head of the Gears of War franchise, has since corroborated this story. While Driver “was awesome on the normal dialogue,” she couldn’t get the right volume for the many combat lines. She didn’t even make it through a whole session before she was cut.
On the other hand, Drake’s work was great. It was his manager who realized how taxing this would be on his voice, and cut things off after one session. Can’t have a singer with a messed up voice, after all. In the end, the roles got filled by Claudia Black and Michael B. Jordan, two… Hollywood talents with plenty of non-VA roles under their belts. That’s not quite how I expected this story to end, honestly.