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ISSUE 27
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“THE MORGAN FREEMAN OF THE GAMING WORLD” BY RYA AYSWA HY MURT
We caught up with Dave Fennoy of The Walking Dead fame at the IGN Convention in Doha. He did his instantly recognizable Lee Everett voice for us and we were floored.
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Screenshots from Season 1 of The Walking Dead
hank you, anonymous fan at the Qatar National Convention Centre, who couldn’t have put it better when he declared Dave Fennoy to be the Morgan Freeman of the gaming world. His deep calming voice was a comfort not just to Clementine but to us as well, as we made trepid strides into the post-apocalyptic world of The Walking Dead where quick fingers keep you alive and a good, steady heart keeps you sane. “Lee was more pulled back because he was worried about Clementine. And he was hushed because he didn’t want the walkers to find them,” he said in Lee’s voice when we asked him how he zeroed down how it would sound. Of course, we squealed in delight. Though Dave has been a voice actor since the 90s (and a morning radio DJ and stage actor before that), The Walking Dead (T WD) brought him a celebrity status that voice actors are usually not used to. “This interest in Dave Fennoy as a guest in conferences didn’t show up till T WD. I have always been a character voice and people knew the voice but not the name. T WD changed all that. It was like winning the Oscars. Suddenly I was being invited everywhere – to Comic Con, Dragon Con, Walker Stalker...,” he says. He almost didn’t do the part. “I like T WD; I have read the comics and watched the show but I was never really a crazy zombie fan. They had already cast someone else for the first episode but I guess they were not very happy with it so they put out another casting call. There was a guy in telltale games who had heard me in another video game and decided to bring me in for an audition,” Dave remembers. Of course, no one could have predicted
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“Lee was more pulled back because he was worried about Clementine. And he was hushed because he didn’t want the walkers to find them.” how big the game was going to be. With the third season under development, the first two seasons to date have sold more than 28 million episodes, won several Game of the Year awards and Dave was nominated for a BAFTA for his performance (“It is such an honor to have your peers recognize your talent. It doesn’t happen often in this business... and hey, free trip to London”). Though Dave’s character dies at the end of Season 1, his legacy lives on through Clementine who now has to navigate the new and treacherous world with Lee’s lessons ringing in her ears. “Lee reminded me of myself a lot,” Dave says. “If I wasn’t doing what I do, I’ll probably be teaching history at some college. And Telltale Games has the ability to write deep and compeling characters which makes our job both easier and more rewarding. The first time we were recording, I knew this was something very, very good. It was different from anything I had done before. Lee was a fully developed, three-dimensional character. And when you played him you feel the full impact of the choices you had to make, and you realize, like everyone else, he is not perfect. He was a professor who found his wife having an affair. Anger takes over and, having killed her and her lover, he is on his way to jail,
thinking his life is over and that he has failed as a human being. Then the zombie apocalypse frees him and he meets Clementine. Taking care of her redeems him and gives him a chance to feel like a worthwhile human again.” It’s a story that everyone wants to be able to relate to. The little choices we make in the game are the ones that we find ourselves making in our everyday lives, only the consequences are amplified in the lawless land struck with the zombie apocalypse. Dave is not a gamer himself but he has seen the playthroughs. “I like watching the game like it’s a T V show,” he says. And you could too. That’s why the game was so popular. Because, beyond the zombie-killing action and the guts and gore, it’s still an engaging story of love, relationships and redemption. “The whole gaming culture has grown up since I started in the business,” Dave says nostalgically. “Game acting in its current form started in the 90s and I didn’t realize it at the time but I was one of the first voice actors in games. However, at that time I thought of it as just another form of animation. A few years ago it occurred to me that gaming and animation have started going in different directions, and gaming has matured as an entertainment medium. It started becoming evident to me that the work I was doing was affecting a whole generation in ways that T V and movies affected their parents. Especially after T WD, many people got in touch with me to tell me that the game had touched their heart, that never had they been so emotionally involved with game characters before and that they cried at the end of Season 1. It changed my outlook on what I was doing. I had never really thought of my work as important before,” he says modestly.