Melissanthi Mahut spent up to five hours a day for eight months recording her voice parts for 'Assassin's Creed Odyssey'.
Melissanthi Mahut
The Greek-Canadian actress is responsible for proving the voice to Kassandra, one of the two playable protagonists in Ubisoft's new action role-playing game, and she admits it was a epic but ultimately "fun" process to lay down all the different lines of dialogue.
Speaking exclusively to BANG Showbiz, she said: "It was months and months of four or five hour days, around eight months, actually ... But the experience is absolutely amazing, although it was a bit daunting at times due to the amount of script there was. There's a lot of dialogue and you're always worried because there is so much script and so many options that you can pick. When you meet somebody there are always three options that you can take and trying to keep consistent with the character but at the same time recognising that a player might want to choose a more aggressive approach or a more friendly approach, it can be tricky. There were a few times where I was worried if I was doing the right thing or had I gone off... You need to keep reminding yourself about the direction."
Melissanthi previously voiced a number of characters in the preceding game 'Assassin's Creed Origins' but the challenge of taking on Kassandra was much bigger due to the huge amount of dialogue required for all the title's options.
The average film script is 180 pages long, whilst some weeks Melissanthi would need to record up to 400 pages of speech for the heroine with no one to work off.
She explained: "You'd have days and weeks where the scripts were up to 300 pages long, the average film only has 180 pages, this had 300 to 400 pages per week, that's a lot of voice work! But it was a lot of fun, don't get me wrong. For me, I've only had experience of 'Assassin's Creed Origins' and now 'Odyssey', it was fascinating trying to find different ways to approach this because when you don't have anyone to act off of, because you're in the voice booth it can be challenging some days. But it was a brilliant challenge to continuously find new things to bring to it."
Melissanthi admits her work on 'Assassin's Creed Odyssey' allowed her to get "re-acquainted with the basics" of acting because she relied a lot on her own imagination to create Kassandra.
The actress - who also carried out motion capture work to bring Kassandra to life - said: "It was all a great challenge because it got me re-acquainted with the basics because you don't have anything visual so you had to base everything on your imagination and let it run wild a bit. For me, that was like going back to acting 101, so I think when you take it down to that basic bit and basic level and you're creating something from scratch and just using your voice to convey an emotional feeling or a feeling you've got as an actor to get the person on the game to relate to what you're doing as an actor, I think it's a very useful tool and I'm really glad that I got to flex that muscle a little bit because it's easy for that to get a bit rusty when you have everything provided for you in terms of a set and theatre work."
'Assassin's Creed Odyssey' - which tells a fictional history of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta - is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows and Nintendo Switch now.
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