Sometimes…a job is all you need.
In certain fields, it’s not “what you know, but who you know.” After all, if someone knows you do quality work, then you’ll get asked to do some new work because your “quality is already proven.” That can absolutely happen in the field of voice-overs, as actors who work for big productions and crush certain roles are often asked to do many others. After all, that field is smaller than you think. For Borderlands actress Ashly Burch, she found this out herself when working on the Gearbox Software franchise, because she got asked to do another game for them that was…well…a huge flop after it dropped.
That title was none other than Aliens: Colonial Marines. Yes, the infamous title that proved once again that just because you can do a game in a big-name franchise…doesn’t mean you should. In a chat with Fall Damage, though, Burch noted that she was actually happy with her time with the game:
“The reason that I got Alien: Colonial Marines is because it’s a Gearbox title,” she recalls. “I had done well enough with Tiny Tina that they were like, ‘Oh, let’s bring her into this thing.’ I was just really excited that I’d gotten another gig.”
Admittedly, she was only a side character in the game, but her character was important enough to make it to the game’s conclusion, which is not a guarantee in those titles. After all, a lot of people usually die in that franchise. Anyway, Burch was not broken up too much that the game flopped, especially since it wasn’t tied to her performance:
“When a game doesn’t do well, sometimes it’s tied to performance, but often, people are thinking about gameplay and narrative more than anything else. So I think I kind of felt like, ‘Are people even going to remember that I was in this?’ Now they do.”
Indeed, this might be a “Wait, she was in that?” kind of thing, which happens more than you think in the voice-over world.
So, what’s the lesson we can grab from this? Simply put, it’s that when it comes to certain jobs, no matter what the outcome is, the actors are just happy to get something else to do. The voice-over field is easily one of the hardest to “stay relevant” in, due to all the other actors trying to get jobs. So, for Burch, especially at that point in her career, it was a huge win to get that side gig…even if it wasn’t one of the more memorable games she was tied to.
