Chris Tester
speaker
144 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Chris Tester’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That's all fascinating. You know, Insight, or Neil Newbon talking about his approach to Astarion and a character that he worked with for four years, and how that character changed massively because of who was playing them.
You know, what Astarion started out as being, and then the thing that, you know, people talk about again and again that Larian did so well is that their writers worked in tandem with the people that they cast. And they then started to write to those people's strengths and go like, okay, this is something that we can build.
So it's a collaborative act as opposed to I'm the genius with all the answers. Do my bidding, children. Try harder until you get it right. And I know which room I would like to be in. That excites me a great deal more. It's why I can't stand Hideo Kojima.
Sorry, I know. No, honestly, I get that too. But I get his whole star thing.
whatever, thing, you get that sense of, oh, he's such an auteur. Yeah, that's one word I'd use for him. It's like, he's probably an incredibly nice guy, and if I ever end up in a project, I'm not now. Just come and bite me on the bum at some point. Like, categorically, definitely. But, yeah, there's just a vibe there that I'm like, that's not a space that I would necessarily thrive with.
And so, yeah, I think that opportunity to really riff, I think is great and can be massively undervalued. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, if I feel replaceable, then I am. And I'm not going to do my best work. Yeah.
I mean, the number one thing is comparison. It's like the, it's the perennial acting. But I think it's, we all do it to a degree. You look at your peers and go like, How have they got that? What are they doing right that I'm doing wrong? Fundamentally. Then you add, you know, social media into the mix because you have to.
And it's amplified even more because obviously, if you're a successful voice actor, you want to leverage that. You have to leverage it. So, you know, you do take that booth selfie or that I'm outside a studio selfie because... it shows people what you're doing. And it's also an affirmation of, yeah, I've got here. Yeah, I'm going to own this. And I'm not going to say like, how dare you?
Having finally got to that, you know, worked with Side Global or OMUK or Pit Stop or whatever on this huge kind of franchise, which because of NDA, you can't talk about, but anyway.
Right.
You know, once you get there, of course you would, because otherwise, what's it all for? It's a celebration of all of your effort and time. However, at the same time, there are at least 20 people all seeing that story and dying slightly inside. I know because I've been on both sides of that every single time. And you can say like, you know, someone else's victory is not my defeat.
But there's still that insecurity always of like, what are they doing right that I'm not doing? And not quite knowing, you know, if there is. It's that lack of autonomy, which is the scary thing. Which is why I try and source my own work by building relationships as much as I possibly can organically.
And then I'll audition for your stuff, but so that I'm one of maybe five or ten options and not one of a hundred options. Because I've been on the other side of casting in the theater world. And I've seen it a little bit in the voice acting world. But for a lot of people, for that first round of auditions, you've got like 100 clips of the same 10 lines.
Your ears aren't going to be as fresh about 20 in. Yeah, yeah. By about 40, you're questioning your will to live. By about 60, what are words? Yeah. By 80, it's kind of like we've only got 20 to go. So, I mean, we should. And by 100, it's like, I don't know what. Did we even press play? I can't.
We don't know. That kind of thing. So that's when you see the whole number of random factors in it. And I think that's probably the toughest thing to do is to kind of like take it on the chin and then keep going and finding ways around it and not questioning yourself too much about it. But you've not got ultimately different directors and different casting people do have different tastes.
So there's not a definitive like, well, this is what you need to do to nail an audition because they have everybody would do it.
Like one casting director who I know is like, if you want to use music in your audition, if you want to change the order of the lines or anything, go for it. Be creative. Make it an opportunity to be as creative as possible. I want to be creative. I want to see your creative response. Make it a fun thing.
It's no surprise that they were originally an actor who's now become a major casting director in video games. There are other video game casting directors who are like, if you do not deliver the exact lines in this exact format, if you ad lib, if you do this, I will automatically delete your audition and move on. And you don't know. You don't know which they're going to be.
So ultimately, you've got to take an educated guess. You do a little bit of research whenever you can. You do workshops. You pay for workshops to learn from these people and what they like and what they don't like. So you can make informed choices. The difference between doing an audition ABC, ABC or AABBCC.
That is a whole kind of huge thing in terms of line orders, and some people prefer one thing and some people prefer something else. So that's it, really. Just trying to keep in the game is the tough spot.
Showing 101–120 of 144 · page 6 of 8
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