Laura Bailey interview: from The Last of Us Part 2 to Critical Role

We had a chat with voice actor Laura Bailey about her roles in video games and her success as a part of the live RPG series Critical Role.

Laura Bailey was already an anime star, but this was the first time she’d ever landed an advertisement. Unfortunately, there was someone along for the ride: a massive zit in the centre of her forehead. There was no hiding it.

“I get in the makeup chair and they’re looking at me,” Bailey laughs. “They’re like, ‘This thing is huge. What did you do?’”

People are whispering, everyone is looking at her, and she overhears the director screaming, “I cannot work like this!”

“It was mortifying,” she says.

Embarrassing moments are just part of the job when you’re an actor.

During one memorable audition, Bailey remembers seeing a famous actor throwing snacks into the air and catching them in his mouth while she tried to perform her audition. When she landed a role in Star Wars Battlefront, it wasn’t until after she was cast that she realised her character was Aqualish, a short alien with tusks instead of teeth. As a performer who doesn’t usually go for non-human roles, walking around like a deranged penguin wasn’t on her bingo card.

In her senior year of high school, Bailey was voted “most congenial”, and she often spent time on her own, away from her classmates. Ironic for someone who wanted to be a biologist because of her fascination with how all things are connected.

Years later, she auditioned for a part in a play on a whim. While she didn’t land the role, the lead actor praised her audition and set her on a path towards pursuing it as a profession. Her first gig was with Funimation, which handled the English dubs for a wide range of anime shows, including Dragon Ball Z. She worked there for years, on dozens of shows.

Laura Bailey. Picture: Heirlume Photography

Bailey’s IMDB page is a near-endless scroll with close to 500 credits, much of it anime, a lot of it video games.

Her first video game gig was for Bloodrayne, where she played a Blade-esque vampire killer who’s half-vampire herself. When she listens to her work on those initial games now, she finds herself cringing. “How did I get the job?” she asks herself. “I didn’t even know how to make the battle reactions.”

Of course, it was a different time…

“Bloodrayne had a Playboy spread,” Bailey says. “And when we were doing a lot of the reaction noises for her, they wanted it to sound slightly sexual in nature. That’s just the way it was then. I didn’t even bat an eye.”

It wasn’t until years later that Bailey really thought about her characters critically. At the time, she lived next to fellow thespian Troy Baker – one of her best friends – and she remembers a conversation they shared.

“I can’t remember what he was working on, but it was some awesome project, and I was playing a girlfriend or wife character, I can’t remember,” she explains. “I was talking to him about how it was hard because he always got to go out for these really awesome roles and I was always going out for the girlfriend role. He didn’t even understand. Like, he had never seen it from that perspective. It’s so cool now to see, just ten years later, how different it has become.”

Bloodrayne. Picture: Ziggurat Interactive

Another eye-opener was moving to LA. Back in Dallas, the Funimation gig kept her busy. In LA, nobody cared. “I couldn’t get in the door with any studio,” she says.

Final Fantasy 13 provided her big break, in which she took the role of the protagonist’s sister, Serah Farron. It felt like she’d finally been accepted in the city where dreams of acting careers so often go to die.

These days, Bailey is a massive success story. Even outside of acting, she’s independently successful thanks to her part in the live RPG series Critical Role, but she’s also landed some huge parts in triple-A games. Perhaps the biggest is her turn as newcomer Abby in The Last of Us Part 2.

Abby’s introduction to the game sees her murdering the protagonist of the original game with a golf club – one of the most controversial scenes in modern video games. Later, the player takes control of Abby and sees things from her perspective. Bailey’s performance, which takes the player from hatred to admiration, is astounding.

Abby from The Last of Us Part 2. Picture: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Before launch, however, some of the cutscenes leaked online, out of context. Without having the chance to see the events unfold as intended, and without giving Abby the chance to shine as the protagonist of the second half of the game, a portion of the audience made their minds up immediately – they hated her. This hatred spilled over into the real world.

“That was a rough period of time,” Bailey says. “It was right as Covid was hitting. It created the worst storm that could have happened. I talked to [game director] Neil Druckmann, I talked to [co-star] Ashley Johnson, and I just kind of backed away from the internet for a while. There was a lot of stuff that came up about that scene and just a lot of degrading messages that came my way. I still see the remnants of it online. Pretty much anything I post, there’s going to be one person that puts something up about that game.”

Bailey, who was heavily pregnant while filming scenes for the game, had become a target for harassment. Over a video game. It made it difficult to separate the work from real life.

A big part of her acting process is forgetting herself when she’s playing a role. She thinks about them beyond the page – the music they like, the food they eat – and tries to fully embrace them, building her understanding of the character. It’s a process that’s helped with Critical Role, where Bailey and other video game actors play pen and paper RPGs to an audience.

Laura Bailey. Picture: Critical Role

“Every single week we’re living in another person,” Bailey explains. “So we’re embodying this character over and over and over again. It has made it so much easier to just drop into a character. Through Critical Role, my acting in other projects has gotten so much stronger just because it makes it easier to tap into the emotions. You have to be able to just shift into gear so fast. We’ll start a game where we had left off on this really emotional moment – somebody has died after some big traumatic moment – and you have to instantly, after this dorky introduction, shift into, ‘Oh, ****, I’m crying again.’”

Though she still plans to carry on acting, Critical Role has become a huge success. Bailey is a million miles away from knocking on doors as a newcomer to LA, and she’s finally in charge of who gets to see her when she has an inconvenient zit in the middle of her head.

Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.