In 2018, British actor Ed Skrein left the superhero film Hellboy when he learned his character was of Asian descent in the comics.Slowly, things are changing for voice actors of color, but there are still a few things the video game industry can still learn from movies and TV. Right: D.Va, Chung's role in the popular video game 'Overwatch.' Broadimage/Shutterstock, Blizzard The opportunity to play heroic characters comes at a time when the entertainment industry reckons with its history casting white talent for non-white characters. It changed the way I saw myself.”Ĭhung’s experience playing an Asian video game protagonist is one that other Asian-American voice actors are sharing. “D.Va embodied everything I felt was a disadvantage and was a strong character,” she says. In playing the bad-ass D.Va in Overwatch, Chung found a nearly perfect representation for herself - plus a giant suit of armor and machine guns. I was always called ‘cute’ and I hated that.” “I always looked at the things that made me uniquely me in the eyes of somebody else, and felt it was a disadvantage,” she says. How overwhelming? A 2018 report from the International Game Developers Association reported 74 percent of employees in video games are cisgender males, 61 percent white/European, and 81 percent identified as straight. Playing D.Va has elevated Chung's career profile and confidence in an overwhelmingly white and male industry. “People struggle with the idea of Asians being American, because the first thing they see is an Asian face and expect you to speak whatever language.” It helped that D.Va's spunky attitude in the game resonated with Chung's own demeanor. I was able to tap into that.”Īt her audition, Blizzard liked what they heard when she gave a voice to the Overwatch character of D.Va, the South Korean pro-gamer-turned-special agent who pilots a humongous battle robot. “I had grown up hearing my dad trying to speak Japanese, mom trying to speak Korean. “I can speak with a crossover accent,” Chung says. She was raised by first-generation immigrant parents - her father is Korean and her mother is Japanese.Ī lifetime of listening to hybrid accents made her uniquely equipped for the role. suburb where half the population is of Asian descent. She didn’t realize it then, but Chung's life would never be the same.Ĭhung, 37, is a native of Diamond Bar, California, an L.A. The character was a "pop star gamer," they said. The developers at Blizzard Entertainment showed her concept-art comprised of results from Google Image search. “They showed me a generic K-pop star,” Chung tells Inverse.Īt the time, the game was still in development, and her character's look wasn't yet finalized. Charlet Chung had been a professional actor for eight years when she auditioned for the role of a video game character in Overwatch.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |