Zelda Williams And The Odd Gentlemen On Living Up To The King’s Quest Legend

The Odd Gentlemen’s recent King’s Quest revival features an impressive cast of well-known actors. In addition to Hollywood familiars like Wallace Shawn and Christopher Lloyd, The Odd Gentlemen cast voice actress Zelda Williams, who recently established herself as a strong female voice for characters like The Legend of Korra’s Kuvira. During our visit to the PAX, we sat down with Zelda Williams and The Odd Gentlemen’s president Matt Korba to learn how Zelda helped shape the King’s Quest script and why Christopher Lloyd’s character was hard to cast.

Zelda, this is your first voiceover work for games, correct? How is the video game acting experience different from traditional voiceover work?
Williams: At some point they might use my voice from the show in the game, but I don’t think that counts, so this is definitely the first video game that I’ve pursued. When I first walked into the studio to record for King’s Quest, I was handed something like 40 pages of dialogue, which was great because that meant we were in the booth for four hours. I really appreciated being able to explore the character for that long, because with a cartoon you come into the studio for an hour and it’s like, “Well, that episode’s done.” It’s more intense with a game. It’s also really fun because you get to act out different reactions depending on what the character does, “Okay, now do it sad. Okay, now do it really happy. Okay, now act like you’re in love with this person.” Cartoons are so linear; you don’t get to do multiple different versions of something.

What’s your history with the King’s Quest series? Did you play any of them before?
Williams: I did. The last one I played was King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride, which had a really great opener where she fell in the lake and then her really sketch-looking mother tries to come after her. Her mother looks borderline Maleficent meets the terrible stepmother from Cinderella with a lot of bad plastic surgery. Growing up, my family, we were all such big video gamers. I mainly liked puzzle adventure games. My mother was straight-up puzzles. My dad was straight-up shooters. And my brothers were all over the map. King’s Quest is nice because it feels like it’s a little bit of a lot of genres, so I feel like it’s a good introduction for me into the world of video game voiceover.

How did you get involved in this project, Zelda?
Williams: That’s your fault isn’t it? [Looks at The Odd Gentlemen’s president Matt Korba] Why don’t you tell that, because I didn’t even know that story until today.

Korba: We’ve never done a project with this big of a VO cast before, so this has been a learning process for us. Since I didn’t know what we were doing, I basically made a PowerPoint for each character that laid out some sample lines and descriptions to create a kind of tone or sample voice for what the character might sound like. We had thousands of initial audition tapes, but we didn’t feel like most of them were working, because we were hoping for such a specific tone. For the blacksmith, Amaya Blackstone, our [producer Lindsey Rostal] suggested that we get Zelda, because she was familiar with her work on Legend of Korra as a kind of tough female heroine. I was like, “Can we do that?” So we just asked, and then the next thing we know we heard back that Zelda said she’d do it.

Williams: I remember getting an email one day, and I was immediately, “Yeah for sure!”

Korba: It was just that easy, and we realized that we could actually try to get the actors we had envisioned for the part initially. With the knight Manny, I had an example line that said he sounds kind of like Wallace Shawn from The Princess Bride, and we realized, “Why don’t we just try to get that person.” A lot of times, we were able to cast the exact person who was our example tone.

Zelda Williams and Matt Korba talk during a panel at PAX 2015

Are all casting decisions are just that easy?
Korba: For us, surprisingly so. Activision and Sierra actually wanted some named actors behind this project, but we were able to really push for this person or that person because we were actually knowledgeable about that side of the industry. Christopher Lloyd was probably the hardest to cast, because we need to find somebody who was a known actor, somebody who was of the right age, had a whimsical tone, and who had an American accent. It was really easy to find British guys who were whimsical and of age, but older American actors all seemed to have New York accents. We even started auditioning some younger people who were trying to age up their voice, but that just doesn’t work. Then we found a clip of Christopher Lloyd and we were like, “Hey, listen to this and try not to think of Doc Brown.” He was perfect. He had that kookiness to him, and he was of the right age.

Williams: I like that you guys were looking for whimsy, because my voice isn’t very whimsical. My voice does not scream fairy tale forests. So I think it’s cool that this game runs the gamut. There’s really comedic voices in here, and really serious voices. I love Christopher Lloyd’s voice. You just want to hear him read you stories all night.

Korba: That was actually on the PowerPoint.

Williams: It was?

Korba: Yeah. It said, “We want a voice that you would love to narrate your favorite stories.”

Zelda, how much did you know about your character going in? Did it evolve at all throughout the recording process?

Williams: It didn’t evolve that much. I remember seeing pictures of Amaya, and I got a brief rundown of what she was like. With auditions, you usually have to read a page or so of dialogue that shows the director what they are going for. With first-person shooters, it’s usually like five different versions of, “There’s an intruder! Pick up that AK-47.” With this game, it was more of an interactive dialogue sequence, and I got to see what Amaya looked like, which was very much what she looks like in the final game. They wanted a very natural form of my voice, with maybe a little more steroid in it, so I just made her a little bit more aggressive.

So you took steroids for this role?
Williams: I did. Which is really painful to inject right into your throat. [Laughs] She was fun, because she’s kind of aggressive and non-ironic, and really loud and funny. I actually really enjoy that about her. I’ve played a lot of really aggressive females now, but she’s kind of unintentionally so. She’s like a bull in a china shop. She’s like a really huggable, scary bull lady.

Korba: It was cool, because Zelda was actually part of the first day of recording.

Williams: I didn’t know that! Sick!

Korba: Yeah, we hid it pretty well. It was my first time being in the studio, but that was cool because we weren’t done with the script at that point either, so we got to see how those sessions worked, and Zelda actually ad-libbed jokes that we worked into the script. We asked her to do some goodbyes, and at one point she said, “Don’t forget leg day!” And we made that a joke throughout the whole game, which is going to come back again in future episodes. I have a theater background, so I was thinking we’d have all the actors ad-lib a bunch of stuff and work that into the game, but Zelda was one of the only actors that wanted to do that stuff.

Video game storytelling has gotten a lot better over the last few decades, but some still think it limits storytelling because of its interactive nature. Considering you guys are making a narrative adventure game, what’s your opinion on that?
Korba: It depends on what you want to do. If you want to tell a story, you should make a movie, or write a book, or make a short film. If you want to make an interactive world, something that you can play around in and help shape, you should make a game. King’s Quest would only work as a game, because there are different paths through the world and the narrative and the player gets to choose those. If we were making a really linear story that didn’t factor in player choices, then I think we’d have to ask ourselves why we were making a game. For us, we’re really interested in doing stuff in the interactive entertainment art form. We pride ourselves on our characters and our stories, but of course all that has to fit into some kind of gameplay, otherwise you could just be making a comic book.

Read our King’s Quest review to learn why The Odd Gentlemen’s episodic series is one of the best adventure games of the year. Also, Zelda and her father, Robin Williams, put together a few Nintendo commercials a few years ago, and you can watch those here.