Disco Elysium: The Final Cut Narrator Interview

The recently-released Final Cut of ZA/UM Studio’s detective RPG Disco Elysium added plenty of voice acting, most of it done by one Lenval Brown, a London musician who you may recognize as the voice behind the game’s skills and its narrator. And if you’d like to know more about the man and his creative process, you can now read this PC Gamer interview, also featuring ZA/UM’s voice director Cash DeCuir.

Here’s a sample question to get you going:

How do you approach an unusual role like this?

LB: I hadn’t played the game and I didn’t truly understand what was going on. But the guide was always to do it low and slow. This dialogue is there to help the player understand what’s going on. The voices in your head have to be slow and meticulous and to the point. So that’s how I decided to approach it. Make it as clear as possible. It’s all one voice, but I tried to put some subtle differences into the performance, depending on which part of Harry’s brain is speaking—whether it’s logic or electrochemistry or whatever.

If I was going wrong, Cash would help me out. I was asked not to overact and focus on relaying the message to the player. And that was better for me, because having to act out hundreds of thousands of lines would have been too much. I couldn’t learn all these lines and I couldn’t read too far ahead, because something might change. So I was always on top of it, doing it day to day. All I could do was take the direction and do it as best as I could.

Cash DeCuir: I think over time we developed a shorthand. Whenever you saw a line that was referencing Dora [Harry’s ex-fiancée, an important character in Disco Elysium], or I told you a line was referencing her, I’d give you that nudge.

LB: Yeah, then I’d make it more tender, more heartfelt. All the voices in Harry’s head have a very different style of writing. Shivers [one of the weirder skills in Disco Elysium, where Harry develops a supernatural, extrasensory connection to the city] was actually an easy one for me. The writing for Shivers is so unique that I could always find the right voice and performance needed to record those lines.