“The Legend of Zelda” turns 40 this year, but the titular princess at the center of the franchise doesn’t look a day over whatever ethereal age the Nintendo video game franchise needs her to be for any given game.
The magic of the fantasy character is in large part thanks to actress Patricia Summersett, who has been voicing the English-dub version of Princess Zelda since 2017’s “Breath of the Wild.” But Summersett says she crafted the now-iconic voice without knowing it was Zelda she was portraying.
“One of the funny things about how that voice was created was that I based it on the specs in the script — but not knowing that it was Zelda because it was secret,” Summersett tells Variety. “I had auditioned for multiple characters, so I went with the archetype that felt like it rested in my body the best at the time. And I knew that my regular voice was too low for a young princess character, so I sort of pitched it up. I found the place that it sat right on my vocal cords. And then I was like, I think she needs to be a little bit more classic English, that was part of the description as well as it could be anything, because it’s a fantasy world. Then I brought it in for the audition, and we worked around with it for a while. But of course, I still didn’t know what it was. So it happened organically, but I had very good reason to try very hard for the audition because, I just moved and I was really focused on doing some sort of good audition. So whatever that translated into, I can’t be sure, except that I’m glad I didn’t know what it was because that might have changed the outcome and I might have tried too hard on something.”
