Finally, the Bond we need.
(Spotted on Bluesky: via G. Willow Wilson)
It's not, like, the biggest problem with increasingly narrow Hollywood beauty standards, but a problem is that it's fucking with our ability to use doppelgangers as a dramatic conceit. The world gets a little smaller any time I see two characters played by nearly identical actors and genuinely cannot tell whether it's supposed to be metatextually significant, or whether the casting director just has a boner for brown-haired, square-jawed white men named Chris.
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I noticed that the majority of the Protocol cast have some experience in theatre- is this just by virtue of how you find your actors or is it a directorial thing?
Interesting spot! Probably an accidental directorial thing at my end. We normally do invite based auditions and industry casting calls meaning that every performer has to record a short excerpt for us to hear and decide on but I think that might put certain types of voice actors at a small disadvantage. Magnus as a franchise tends towards mucky, naturalistic performance but that means that often, voice actors who have spent years on corporate gigs, digital games, animation etc. learning to give pristine soundbites can sound a bit out-of-place. We want mucky, grungy, fidgety, believable delivery with non-verbal reactions when other characters are talking. For any other project those are a bad thing but for us, they are essential. Experience in live performance does help when it comes to live appearances etc. but that is a secondary consideration. Also lets be real, its rare these days to find a performer who only works in one medium. The money is rarely good enough to be that specific, and I anecdotally believe most professional performers in the UK still get their start via theatre (though happy to be corrected on that if anyone has real data to work from. TLDR: I think we end up with more theatre or film performers than you'd expect due to Magnus needing less sanitised performances than most other V.O. work.
