Debra Wilson’s voice, one of the most recognizable in video games, carries a singular authority. It’s a sound that’s propped up special agents, presidents, military commanders, dragons, demons, and Jedi masters. But despite her incredible range--Wolfenstein cutscene director Tom Keegan calls her "his muse" because he loves to work with her so much--she’s also one of gaming's most recognizable faces. Game developers often scan her and build characters around her commanding presence, individuality, and unmistakable aura.
It’s a blessing and a curse for an actor who wants to inhabit characters. Wilson has voiced main characters in over 100 different games, but there is also at least a double-digit number of games in which the creators have used her physical likeness, as well.
"I don’t necessarily dig it," Wilson told GameSpot in an exclusive interview. "Because I might as well be doing it on camera. It's hard to suspend your disbelief. There are people who are like, ‘Oh my God, she's in every f***ing game. What the f***?’ And there are other people like, ‘I am sick of looking at her face because I just want to play the game and not think of Debra Wilson.’"
Recently, Wilson’s prominence in games was parodied in Focus M, an internet video poking fun at AAA game design. The video sees Mario running around a horrifically generic fan-made Unreal Engine-style world, quipping and being guided by a voice on the radio. The big reveal at the end shows Wilson in her home booth, as the voice behind Toadsworth.
While it suggests she’s in on the joke, unfortunately--like her Destiny 2 farewell video--it just came in as a request on Cameo, a service where fans pay actors to record lines in character. She’d never seen the video until I showed it to her, though she said she loved it.
Wilson does her best to remain unplugged from the discourse, but it still sometimes spills over into her periphery and she sees the comments from people who say they’re sick of seeing her face pop up in games. It doesn’t faze her. "I don't blame them because I feel the same," she says.
"Why do you have to show my face? Amanda Waller in Suicide Squad, Grace Walker in Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, and now with the new Wolverine game, I'm Callisto. Guess who the f*** she looks like?"
"They wanted to scan my original tattoos," she continued. "I was like, ‘Now you're pushing it. No, you're pushing that shit.’ So I have been grateful for the work that has come in the video game industry where my characters are European."
Wilson isn’t always against her likeness appearing in games, but she doesn’t appreciate being singled out. Often she’s one of a few cast members who end up scanned into a game, while other castmates get to slip under a virtual skin. As someone obsessed with empathy and living other truths, it removes some of the magic that attracted her to video games in the first place--this medium that allows actors to be anyone or anything else. In Date Everything, for instance, she plays a sentient water heater. She says she’s constantly searching for the core truth that makes us people, and she even finds time to empathize with those who would see her hard work erased.
"I choose to see things more with fascination and respect, so I can move through the planet with a different type of grace than a lot of people," Wilson tells me. "I want to move through with love and forgiveness. I want to move through with awareness and what I call ‘overstanding.’ Because it's so easy to hate and be ignorant. People don't give a shit how destructive it is because, on that selfish level, it gives them the satisfaction of what they consider being right, without the consequence of what it does to somebody else. They’re too afraid to experience somebody else's truth and realize that it might be theirs as well."
Wilson's parents were English teachers. Her father was the first man to bring the fraternity system to Allen University in South Carolina, and her mother was the first woman to bring the sorority system to the same college. In World War II, her father fronted an all-Black band with a bunch of other soldiers--Wilson’s father was the lead singer, and the piano player at the time was Nat King Cole. Her parents' work left a major mark on Wilson.
"They were extremely active in the community," Wilson says. "My father was active in the arts. He was active with the City of New York Parks and Recreation. I worked for Parks and Recreation for 14 years, so that was a huge influence on me. I started working when I was 14, and I never asked my parents for money again after that."
Wilson started acting while working for the city, landing roles in Broadway plays and a couple of television series, movies, and commercials. But she didn’t take acting seriously because of the voice nagging in the back of her mind, telling her she wasn’t good enough. That’s partly why internet criticism doesn’t keep her up at night--throughout her life, she’s been way harder on herself.
"I was already succeeding," she says, "I threw that away because my low self-esteem and childhood trauma came up saying, ‘You'll never make it.’ I learned more from my pain than I did anything else. I learned how to love through my traumas. They're always with me, and I know how to use them so that's why I'm always grateful for them. My childhood traumas support me being the superhero in somebody else's experience. So they serve me. I no longer serve them."
Wilson can’t pinpoint when this change happened; it was a gradual evolution bubbling away sometime after she moved to California and landed a role as one of the eight original cast members on sketch comedy show MADTV. There, she played original characters and did impressions of Oprah Winfrey and Whitney Houston. At first, the past was an anchor tied around her waist. Over time, she says, she learned to quiet the voices holding her back.
"The foundation was lack of self-love," Wilson explains. "I deplored myself. I disrespected myself on every level. I just wanted to love others, which was essentially psychologically loving myself in a way that I could not accept for myself. So if I saw someone, I loved them as if they were me because I could not love myself directly. But I was a loner, and I loved being alone. I didn't have relationships growing up as a kid. No boyfriends or anything like that.
"I had a few terrible experiences with men when I was younger, that I didn't count on, didn't want. I would not see them as abusive. I led myself into spaces to be loved, because I knew I couldn't love me, but I didn't know what love was, other than a sense of control over men, or allowing men to have a sense of control over me. Was it abusive? Mainly abuse of myself to allow it. There were certain things I didn't allow. And still, I felt like it was my fault. There's something about me that they saw me as the victim, or they saw me because of my past. Linear thinking gave me a sense of what I believed was control, while I was out of control."
In 2008, God "spoke to" Wilson and "touched [her] third eye," she says. It wasn’t an audible voice, but a feeling that caught in her chest and filled her thoughts up with love. Everything that had happened to her washed over her like a wave, tracing a line between her thought processes, the vitriol she had for herself in her own thoughts, and the trauma she experienced that made her feel this way. Suddenly, she could reflect on the evidence: She deserved love, especially from herself.
"[God] shut me up with a touch and showed me in a millisecond every relationship I ever had with a man and how I felt about myself and saw my childhood traumas, which were clouding my judgment, and once I saw that, I was instantaneously healed," Wilson explains.
You have to remember something: Everybody comes to this planet to learn life lessons."
"You're not supposed to get it right away," she continued. "That's why you have a brain. That's why you're going to shit yourself until you learn how to be potty trained. I mean, all of these things are these learning processes to get back to our beautiful and amazing truth."
Wilson has spent her entire career empathising with different truths. Being an actor--especially in video games, where you can go viral for saying "scrib doon" as Galactic League racer Biddy Blas--allows you to wear another person’s clothes and see life from a new perspective. When she played Angrboða’s grandmother in God of War Ragnarok, Wilson had purposely avoided Laya DeLeon Hayes, who played Angrboða, in an attempt to put her scene partner off-balance and capture an authentic performance from the pair of them, creating distance between them so the on-screen confrontation fizzed with authenticity.
"There are two things that are equal playing fields: death and emotion," Wilson says. "I'm embracing the things that make us the same, and I step through it. I'm aware of what serial killers are like, and the psychology of it. So when I step into that, there is a sympathy and an awareness and an opportunity to go, 'Wow, I realize that that could, in another lifetime, be me.'"
Wilson says she feels a great responsibility to every story she inhabits, so she always starts at that core, stripping a character down to their emotional truth, empathizing with them and imagining the series of circumstances that made them the way they are. She sees the story as greater than her, which is partly why she struggles with her likeness getting in the way for some people. She’s a "servant to the story" and to the writers, who wrestled with their own demons to get that story onto the page.
Her approach to acting is the same as her approach to life, she says: "Love people and show the f*** up." She attributes this outlook to her relationship with God, who she shaved her head to be closer to.
"I am refreshed and I want to use this as a beacon," she says, touching the top of her head. "Like Buddhists and like monks. I want to keep it clean and shaved for all the downloads. It's symbolic of keeping my head open to receive."
When it comes to showing off that receiver in-game, Wilson wants to let the artists do whatever they think is best for the story. "I'm not here to control the gang," she says. "I'm here to tell their story, and if you want to tell the story that way, you go right ahead. And I will lend myself completely to it because this is a service industry for me. I'm here to serve you."
In Death Stranding 2, she played a doctor with two right hands. Other than the freaky hands thing--and minus the tattoos--the character is a one-to-one recreation of Wilson, but that’s the same for Troy Baker, Norman Reedus, and the majority of the rest of the cast, outside of special appearances by director Hideo Kojima’s filmmaker mates.
"I am not upset at their choice to do that because everybody looks like themselves," Wilson says.
A project with Kojima was another opportunity to learn for Wilson, who says she'd never worked with a director quite like him. Kojima doesn’t speak English, so everything was done via a translator, and all of Wilson’s scenes had to be filmed in a single day, with very little prep time. Usually, actors film performance capture in scenes--they rehearse, they block, and they shoot, and so there’s room to play around with the character within those bounds.
"He shot it as if it was a play," Wilson says. "So when you're on stage, you have a certain amount of time on stage to be in that space, as opposed to shooting sections. He allows the entire emotional flow to play out. You're on stage and it's a whole scene. Normally when you're shooting performance-capture, a scene might be three minutes, two minutes of dialog--he'll shoot seven to 10 minutes, so I didn't have all of that down because I don't want to memorize anything. I want to connect with the director to see what his vision is, and so words are meaningless if I can't connect to the director and see what his vision is. But he didn't speak English."
Death Stranding 2 is a game in which all the complicated lore is already established, but Wilson didn’t know her BBs from her chiralium. All she had were the words on a page. After meeting Kojima, she took the translator’s assistant in the back to run over everything.
"Once I did that, I was ready," Wilson says. "It was solidified. That hour was the perfect amount of time. So no matter how you wanted to block me, I wasn't going to be focusing on blocking while losing what's going on in my head, or the next words in my head.
[Kojima] knew what he wanted. He's more than a director. He's an artist."
It comes back to that openness and "overstanding" Wilson drives her life forward with. Death Stranding 2 caught her off guard because it wasn’t a typical setup, but she remained open to Kojima’s process and ended up delivering one of the most memorable performances in the game.
Wilson learned to love herself through her own interpretation of a higher power, and through that self-awareness she created a mantra to live by that lets her wear other characters like a skin onesie. It's the perfect fit every time because she’s comfortable in her role as a conduit for stories and experiences. It is how she's able to crack open the window on another person’s worldview and let them experience another truth. She finally loves and accepts herself, which allows her to authentically live by her own words: "Love people and show the f*** up." That’s why you probably won’t stop seeing her face, and her talent, in video games anytime soon.