Fallout 3 VO Interview

Planet Fallout offers an interview with Fallout 3 voice actor Wes Johnson, who voiced the characters of Mr. Burke, Fawkes, and some robots.

PF: In the game you make voiceovers for two different characters. How did you prepare both of them, and made sure they would be recognized as completely different personas?

WJ: I actually play a few robots as well as Fawkes and Mr Burke. Mr Burke was the easiest of them all to do, because Emil had written him with me in mind after our work together on Oblivion. He wanted someone who was basically Lucien Lachance’s Dark Brother from another Mother. So I used the sinister, unctuous tones of Lucien, made them more corporate and stripped the very slight accent off of him. They are slightly different voices, but they are enough alike that you will recognize it immediately. Especially Burke’s very first line, which was very Lucien.

But beyond that, I just felt that Burke was unctuous, condescending, and really felt he was slumming every time he opened his mouth to your character. He doesn’t feel that he is evil himself. He just feels that he’s a businessman, and that he is in a completely different class than the scum he finds himself dealing with. I am not surprised in the least that people want to kill him after speaking with him. He’s a bit of a douche.

Fawkes was a cool character to voice. If a gorilla were suddenly given a speech center in their brain, and had to force intelligent conversation through a voice box that wasn’t built for it, that’s what you’d have with a Super Mutant. It’s a very frustrating situation for them, especially the dumber ones. They TRY to communicate, but it’s mostly monosyllabic grunts and simple phrases. Otherwise, they just get angry, frustrated, and lash out like Billy Budd when his stuttering gets too bad.

Super Mutants mostly communicate through violence, and that is doubly upsetting for Fawkes. Fawkes has had NO ONE to speak to, and has been in that situation for a long time. Most would succumb to madness. When your character arrives, Fawkes is almost like your Grandmother when you finally remember to call her up. It’s hard to stop the conversation, and you almost feel guilty if you do. By the way, I have never been more exhausted after a voice session than I was after the Super Mutants sessions. Between Fawkes, Uncle Leo and the rest of them, I felt like a truly puny human when I was done.

The robots? Simpler. Sentry Bot has a very military programming, and is a fairly straightforward model. The Protectron is a little more fun. It was designed as a security bot for a multitude of businesses, and it’s programming has been slightly altered for each one. It was a very Robby the Robot style voice to begin with, and then we would throw little corporate phrases from Metro, or Megaton, or better yet, Nuka-Cola into its speech pattern. Between halting speech, incorrect emphasis in the wrong places, and an occasional emotionless violent outburst, these were really fun to voice. Mark Lampert did a GREAT job processing these, and making them sound just like they should. And his playfulness at letting phrases like (Nuka-Cola) sound slightly different gave these robots a layering they might not have had otherwise.