Hvis du har spillet Compulsions South of Midnight, vil du uden tvivl kende karakteren Hazel. Hun er spillets hovedperson og centrum for dette fantasy-eventyr - og den, der bringer hende til live, er Adriyan Rae. Hendes præstation har allerede indbragt hende en nominering til en Golden Joystick, hvilket uden tvivl varsler endnu mere anerkendelse ved kommende prisuddelinger.
For nylig havde vi fornøjelsen af at tale med Rae for at høre mere om hendes oplevelser med South of Midnight - herunder historien om, hvordan hun fik rollen som Hazel. Som Rae fortæller os, var der nærmest tale om et guddommeligt sammentræf.
"Well, to be honest, when you have video games, right, they don't really give you actual sides from the game. They don't really tell you about the game. They give you a fake name of the game. So the only thing that I had that drew me really initially was her name," began Rae.
"So my great aunt - my late great aunt - her name was Hazel and she had just passed maybe two weeks before I got the audition. And I called my mom and I said, "Mom, guess what? I got an audition and guess what the character's name is?" She was like, "what?" I was like, "Hazel!" She was like, "oh my gosh, look at our Hazel sending you blessings."
"So yeah, that's what initially attracted me. The scene that they sent was really fun and it, I added a emotional part to it and I was like, oh, that felt good. And as I got a callback and they actually gave me the real... the real audition from a scene, it was the scene with my mother, where I'm in the house and I'm like, 'I don't have time for that. I ain't got no room for these type of shoes'. That's when I was like, oh, that resonated because I have such a good relationship with my mother and the playful banter felt like me and my mother. And then the feeling of if my mother swept away in the trailer, oh my goodness...
"So it really, I really was able to ground it and resonate with it. And from there I had a callback and then I had a session where I'm talking with folks and they showed me more of the story because, you know, you have to get through all these steps to even learn anything. So I finally got through it and I learned that she's a healer and she's on her journey to self and all of that was like parallel with my life. So I was like, well, okay, yeah, this is good. Literally I got off one of the calls and I was like, why not? Is this like meant for me? It was literally like God said here, take this."
Rae står over for hård konkurrence i år, blandt andet fra Troy Baker som Indiana Jones, Jennifer English som Maelle, Erika Ishii som Atsu og flere andre. Du kan stemme på Rae i de gyldne joysticks her.
Du kan også se vores fulde interview med Rae nedenfor, hvor vi taler mere om South of Midnight og hendes tidligere og kommende projekter.
