Cyberpunk 2077’s Emily Woo Zeller on Playing Panam Palmer, Voice Acting

Fred Richani of TSC Gaming. We have right here on the line a very special guest. She is an actress, she is somebody? That’s a part of one of the biggest video games in recent years. We’re talking about Cyberpunk 2077. We are talking to Emily wuzeller who plays pan am in Cyberpunk 2077 also done a number of roles over the years Emily. How’s everything going? Hey, good happy to be here. Can you just talk about how you got involved with Cyberpunk it was a pretty traditional. Pathway, I guess my agent sent me an audition for a project that I did not know was in fact this video game.

And I auditioned and then when they booked the job she told me what game it was and that’s it. I didn’t even know who pan am was going to be in the in terms of, you know, her significance in the game at all when it was booked do you usually get any material ahead of time and know what you’re reading or is it right there on the spot for the most part. It’s right there. Yeah, they really try not to they don’t give the actors too much the less that they can have materials floating around in the world the better. So, okay. Okay that makes sense.

I never thought of it that way. Okay, that’s awesome to know a nice fun fact about voice acting. So since you didn’t know mantra if any of the material coming into it did anybody tip you off did your agent or somebody say, hey, by the way. It’s this is a game by CD projekt Red who created a little game called the Witcher 3. Did you have any idea just the scope of this project. Well, once I found out what the project was then of course I knew because I have a lot of friends who were hardcore gamers. And I had I didn’t talk to them about it, but I had heard over the years about CD projekt Red and of course Witcher Cyberpunk like a lot of games like that they’re open world.

Not just deep when it comes to mission side quests and content everything else, but dialogue I mean tons and tons of dialogue. How long were the days, how often did you have to recite different lines and everything for games. We usually we have a director. And so the director is doing a lot of the guidance and helping with shaping of scenes the director that I worked with the most was pierce o’toole which shout out to you pierce he’s amazing. He did a really really great job. I’m so smart. And so articulate. And so like just with it. But yeah, so we run through scenes. We do a few takes.

I did not have any direct interaction with any of the other actors. So we record our scenes all separately. It’s really the director. That’s the glue that keeps everything together. And sometimes a creative somebody from the creative side on CD projekt Red directly like a writer or something would be present, which helped a lot too. Yeah. And so you go in for typically booked for four hour sessions. So you’re going through as much as you can in four hours. I’m assuming you saw the finished product. Have you had a chance to play the finished product and kind of play as or with pan am I have not yet.

I’m sure everybody feels a little bit differently about this, but at this point. I’ve been in voiceover long enough that I’m comfortable with my own voice, but I mean, that’s a lot of gameplay with myself, you know what I mean? Like I’d be more interested perhaps in some other fantastical world in like continuing to be pan am and playing with the other characters, you know what I mean, I don’t know that I really want to be a V and play with myself, but so I if I, you know, when I do get around to playing the game. I would play V and probably play with the other characters.

I still even if I do play the game. I wouldn’t be playing with myself. I know what I did. I don’t need to like, go back and hear it all like over again. And yeah, hey, if it makes you feel better. I’ve been doing broadcasting for years. And I still find it weird. Sometimes when I hear my own voice and like narrations and things like that. It’s like, oh man. Like I sound like that, like all right. I’m enough like I said it the first time I don’t need to hear. It exactly exactly. Although. I will say that, you know, she the way they animated her is gorgeous she’s beautiful.

So I wouldn’t mind seeing that I just yeah, I don’t have to listen to myself understood and I know with some voice actors that I’ve interviewed in the past. Sometimes they get face scanned or do any kind of motion capturing it as well. Did you get face scanned or motion captured at all when you were doing the game? No, not for this no, okay because there was a lot of debate at the time of the release of the game like who is pan am and like they had they identified one actress, but it turned out to be you and everything else. So, all right. That’s kind of fun.

So they scan somebody else, but you did the voice. Well, I don’t know if they face scanned somebody else, but they did not use my face. So, I don’t know they might have built her from scratch. I have no idea how they actually did it. But they didn’t use my face. So, okay there. We go at least we solved one part of the mystery. Yeah, cool. There you go. Now you’ve done so many projects if somebody hits up your IMDb page. I mean, the list goes on and on. It’s very impressive spectacular career so far up to this point, but I’m curious for you. How did you get into acting, did you dream about being a voice actor, did you see yourself more on stage or in the silver screen.

How did it all start for you totally. Yeah, well, I have been performing since I was in utero my mother was part of a chinese folk dance group in LA and she performed when she was eight months pregnant with me. So very early on obviously dance was an important thing to her as a chinese immigrant her parents neither had enough money nor saw the value in her doing any kind of extracurricular art classes. So when she became an adult and had a family of her own she wanted to be able to give me and my sisters the opportunity to do that. So and she was fortunate enough to you know, have a steady salary to be able to afford that.

So we did sort of city classes county classes and local local private stuff. Within the chinese American community in southern California. And so yeah, I started dancing and my father was a professional musician before he settled down with the family. So he played guitar. And so, we always had music and I always sang with him. So, I was singing and dancing from the very beginning and then once I started getting more involved in school then theater started folding into that. But very early on. I identified being a voice as something that would be awesome to do, you know, as a Disney character or something like that, right?

That those are my first. Introductions to the art and then as I got older. I never really had a super strong never really had a super strong desire to get on screen growing up in LA for better or for worse gave me a very particular perspective on the industry. And we definitely had the opportunities as mixed kids in the 80s to do commercial work and things like that. I think I did one I did one spot for LA kids when I was like, oh gosh eight or nine. We were performing for the monterey monterey park, which is a city in LA the monterey park city hall because it was chinese new year and we always performed all around LA during chinese new year and LA kids?

Was there filming it and they were like, hey you and you like you kids come here just help us do the opening sequence to this to the silly kids spot. You know, I mean, this is like this is still the 80s or I guess it would have been early 90s maybe and so that happened. But other than that. Yeah, never a real strong desire for a film, but I did love being on stage that felt like a second home to me. So, yeah, voice over in stage has always been kind of my thing that’s awesome. And it’s crazy. So you’ve pretty much been in showbiz or sort of tied to showbiz pretty much your entire life, which is pretty awesome.

And obviously actors you’ll have multiple projects things of that nature sometimes you’re on a series for a cup of coffee sometimes you’re on for several years when did you realize I don’t know if the right phrases made it. But when did you realize, okay, I’m firmly entrenched here and I’m getting consistent work arguably. That’s still questionable for me. I don’t know that in that an actor. I mean, maybe if you skyrocket into sort of a-list status and you make enough money and you’re smart enough with that money to be able to feel financially secure that, you know, you feel like oh, okay. I’m like here now.

Yeah, but I feel like even the people who win the big awards the tonys and the grammys and the, you know, the oscars that they I don’t know how secure even they feel you know, I mean they call it a curse, right after you get the one big award that you their next few movies will be really bad. I mean, at least you’ll have those movies. That’s something we’re not talking about the quality of the work. We’re doing about getting work, right? Yeah, so, I don’t know. I think it’s still kind of a question for me, but I don’t question my own ability as an artist as much anymore which is another a different thing.

But yeah, I’ve been doing. So the vast majority of my voice over work is in audiobooks. And that I started doing full-time beginning at the end of 2012. So I had started that aspect of it in 2009, but so, I’ve been doing full-time voice-over since then so I guess we’re coming up on nine years. Now, there’s always still that kind of working menta working actor mentality in the back your mind because with showbiz. I mean, it’s well it’s good to get. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you don’t very rarely do you get signed on to something that is for sure. Going to last for a significant amount of time.

It’s always like, okay, cool. Are you available tomorrow for this thing that’s going to run next month. Yes. Okay, what are you doing next month. Well, I don’t know. We’ll see what comes up, you know, it gets. Yeah. So at some point. You lived in hong kong for a while, right for a short time. Yeah, a couple years. Okay. And so you lived in hong kong were you primarily working on anime then yeah. Yeah, I actually my first job when I was there was teaching dance jazz in ballet at a local studio, but I was gigging a lot. I was doing shows. I was doing singing and dancing and theater and then teaching dance during the day and through that network of actors.

Who were english-speaking actors who were there. I got connected to the audition for the dubbing gig and that’s how that started. So yeah. So, but for the majority of the time that I was there. I ended up doing dubbing for anime and commercials and films and stuff including Pokemon, right? Which well, I’m a big I’m a big Pokemon fan. So I had to mention that nice. Yeah, Pokemon actually happened when I came back to the states. But yeah, the other shows some of the ones are my melody. I played kuromi in that and yakitate and jinban kaleidoscope and oh gosh. There were so many shows.

We did it. We did a season a week. So, yeah, everywhere. Yeah, well, I don’t know where they are now. They we weren’t allowed to have copies of our work because it was hong kong. So there was no union in the us, we have sag-aftra which of which I’m a member. But yeah, before that it was no union. So nobody could was keeping watch on how much pay we got or what our breaks were or any access to residuals or copies of work or anything like that. So as far as I know it’s out in the world. Somewhere I don’t know. So I was actually going to ask that like what’s the biggest difference between hong kong and Hollywood and it seems like the lack of unionization.

I mean, is that just a not a thing there or is it just not encouraged not as far as I know it’s not a thing there. But, you know, it’s a it’s an issue in the us, too. And when we have sag-aftra at least, but there is a lot of work that is non-union that also is in the us. So and anything that is non-union is going to be subject to the wild wild West. You also have a pretty cool side project if I have the name correctly. It’s called nice and naughty. Yeah. So that’s yeah, that’s one series the company is called love bites originals.

And yeah, it is it’s a side project of love a fellow actor and narrator and writer. She and I connected a few years ago and realized that we had very similar visions about what we wanted to put out into the world. And so we got together. And it is very much a side project. We have to take our time with it. We do have a patreon page because the more financial backing we get for it. The faster, we can produce more. But so far. We have our just our baby first season. And we’re working on seasons two and three very actively right now. So, hopefully those will be out soon without giving too much away, of course of the story and everything.

Can you just describe it a little bit for anybody that might want to contribute to the patreon sure. Yeah. Yeah. It’s short story romance and erotica. So we wanted to put out shorter bits the romance industry in the audiobook industry within the audiobook industry is huge. There’s a huge huge a number of people who are were voracious readers and listeners, but it is in novel form and we figured it would be nice to be able to have short stories that were also curated by both she and I to be very sex positive and to have all kinds of people from all walks of life all ages all sizes all colors all orientations little genders like mix it up, right?

Like sometimes the romance genre. I think it’s less. So now, but sometimes it can get very bogged down in story tropes and stereotypes and these types of things. I mean arguably that’s why a lot of the listener readers listen or read to that because they don’t want anything that’s going to challenge them. They want that very stable stereotype or the archetype of the story or anything, but we wanted to put something out that was a little more colorful. So that’s what we’re doing is we’re yeah, we’re building a community of writers, too. So if you’re a writer. And you’re interested in writing queer colorful or mixed company romance or erotica let us know because we’re super open to building our world.

This is probably a silly question, but I would imagine with the explosion of audible and just audio in general with podcasting that industry has just kind of blown up, right? Yeah. Yeah. It’s been on the rise and know that it was during the recession not terribly affected. It was one of the few industries that was continuing to grow. I don’t know how well the industry has done over the course of the pandemic, but it certainly has not really slowed. So, I don’t know if it’s continued to grow, but it’s definitely still alive and kicking would you say with video games and just voice acting in general that I don’t say they’re pandemic proof, but they weren’t as harmed by the pandemic compared to some other industries like say, you know, broadway.

Yeah. And compared to other aspects of performing arts for sure. Yeah, because it is something that you can do from home. If you have the proper setup. And you’re willing to because when you’re doing it from home, you don’t have a director, you don’t have an engineer you don’t have anybody else on the creative team. And then you have all of the normal from home issues that can pop up now. Before we get you out of here, we always like to ask our guests some quick hit questions just steal kind of rapid fire some fun random questions just for people to get to know you better.

Are you ready? Okay. Favorite late night snack or cheat meal? Oh, god cheese just any kind of cheese. Yes. Okay. There you go. You can’t go wrong. What was your first gaming roll this goes back sync I think general kim. I think I played a general in some game that was out of the ukraine or something like that. All-time favorite actor. Okay, I’ll give you two choices. We could do like, you know, the quote-unquote traditional actor and then if there’s a voice actor, you happen to admire, you know, since I don’t think voice actors get enough love feel free to agreed agreed voice actors don’t get enough of I’m going to give you a few.

Okay. Favorite male gene kelly favorite female francis mcdormand and favorite audiobook narrator. Okay, so this is audiobook people are a tight-knit community. We’re really tight. I love you all but I love january lavoy. I think she’s amazing. I was gonna ask you if you weren’t an actor, what would you be, but I know you have like this whole background in show biz. So, I’m gonna rephrase it if you weren’t in show business. If your parents weren’t in show biz. What would you be doing right now and be working in environmental science and combating climate change. 100. I’ve, it’s always been my background I have a science background and I have always thought, you know, if this doesn’t work out.

I’m going to pick that back up and I’m going to get into the field. So you have a science do you have a science degree or did you study environmental? Yeah, I yeah, I took pre-med classes in college and had a minor in nutritional sciences at uc berkeley. That’s fantastic. Well, you know what if they ever do a Captain planet reboot they should definitely cast you that’d be amazing. All-time favorite movie or series. Singing in the rain what role did you play that you most related to or I guess what character did you play that you most related to personally most related to? I mean, I’ve played a lot of characters in books that have been pretty spot on, but for video games?

I think pano definitely wins for that. Yeah, I really got her. I understood her, did you get to do any of the traditional media you normally would do for a big production like Cyberpunk or did the pandemic kind of curtail that. Yeah. Yeah. As far as I know the pandemic curtailed in I didn’t I certainly didn’t do any of the pre things. There were a few things that like keanu did. And I think jeremy might have done. But yeah, I wasn’t involved in those. So if anything was going to happen later. Yeah didn’t happen. So, he didn’t get to meet keanu reeves and ask him to say arasaka in person.

Did you no, I didn’t but keanu I want to make you I really really want to meet you, man. He was really he was really good in that game too. And you know, just you know, my friends, I had a drinking contest every time we heard him say arasaka, you know, why is somebody as passionate as Johnny silverhand about taking down the man. Yeah, he did a great job. Pretty sure. What’s your most awkward career moment ooh awkward career moment oh gosh. I’ve learned to take everything that’s awkward. And turn it into like I mean this sounds so excuse my French. That’s not good. It’s so cliche, but like truly like I my bar for what is awkward.

And what’s embarrassing is basically non-inexistent like it’s really hard to embarrass me. So any awkward moment would be like, you know, something I would learn from. So I that’s my terrible answer to your question. No. That’s cool. All right. There you go. There you go, actually, you can relate to pan am both of you guys have thick skin. So that’s good. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. This is kind of like whatever dude. You do you I’m gonna do me. And if you have a problem with that’s your problem. As long as I’m not hurting anybody who cares voice acting what are some do’s and what are some don’ts?

Let’s just say an aspiring actor is watching this, you know they want to break into the industry. Maybe they just started got their first gig what are the biggest do’s and don’ts of the voice acting industry do study and practice take coaching take lessons don’t assume that just because everybody in your life has always told you that you have a nice voice that means that you’re also an actor they’re different things. So learn how to be an actor. And take your time it takes a really long time and you may never. You may never feel like you’ve fully made it. But yeah, I’d say just don’t put all don’t put all your eggs in that one basket treat it with respect give it the time and dedication that it needs, but also know that it’s going to take a really long time if ever.

You can get to a full-time position. And so, you know, I always had five different jobs going at the same time. And that’s just kind of the reality of the way it is you mentioned you taught ballet, right? Yeah, well, I taught yes to babies I taught ballet, but mostly I’m a jazz and modern and ballroom and chinese dance those are my specialties. Wow with ballet, I’ve interviewed a couple ballet dancers before and what y’all go through and what they and what they go through is it’s crazy as far as like the physical limits. They push themselves to what would you say is like the biggest misconception about ballet kind of a kind of a random question.

But when you said ballet triggered me because I interview fighters at full disclosure also interview fighters combat sports athletes and sometimes sometimes they’ll say. Oh, yeah. This ain’t ballet and I’m thinking ballet’s not easy dude. Yeah. Well, there you go, that’s a big misconception about ballet is that it’s easy. I’ll say this for maybe all of dance instead. Because I don’t want to speak on for ballet when that’s not my specialty. Oh, yeah. Big biggest misconception on dance that it’s for girls a number one. And yeah, and that it’s and then it’s easy at certainly at the professional level. I mean, anybody can dance. I will say that and then I will also say that if you want to dance at the professional level you do need years and years of training in addition daily training there were people who were like that I knew that I came into in the performing arts world who were like, oh, yeah.

I dance I’m a mover like, oh, oh, great. But you know, tell me more about this because I’ve you know, literally every single day of my life since I was a wee less, you know, talk to me and they’ll be like yeah, I took a tap class. Once once a week for like a semester and I’m like great. I am glad that became that was something that you could do, but that does not make you a dancer. So I’m sorry if that applies to you, but if it applies to you don’t call yourself a dancer just say. You took a dance class like dancers are they’re a different breed.

I think yeah. Awesome tremendous insight there. I appreciate it. And I actually I appreciate all your insight not just on your own career, but on the industry and showbiz as a whole because I think there again. There’s a lot of misconceptions a lot of people think it’s easy the people that are good. And great. They make it look easy, but they don’t see all the work that goes into it. That’s right. It’s yeah. You have to be extremely lucky and hardworking and talented to some degree. To and all of that needs to be working in order for it to make sense and you have to really want it.

Because it is so hard. So if you don’t want it enough other things are going to become more attractive to you. And for a good reason. There’s nothing wrong with that, you know, but with very few exceptions of like what I call the cult of personality. I mean, I didn’t make that up, but you know, with except for the handful of people that get put and become mega stars because of their own personal personality it happens because you have honed your work and your craft and you’ve made connections and you’ve been honest and had full integrity and like people see that and they respect that.

And then they want to hire you so it takes a long time to build that cred? Well, I was going to ask you what the best piece of advice is you give anybody for success? But I think you pretty much found it there. That’s probably what I’d say. Yeah. Well, I really do appreciate the time. Before we let you go, where can fans find you online on Instagram I am z Woo, man. That’s z-w-o-o-m-a-n. I’m technically also on Facebook I’m not very active on Facebook I’m generally not very active on social media in general. But I am on Instagram and I am on Twitter with the same handle z-w-o-o-m-a-n.

Yeah. And love bites originals is love b-y-t-e-e b-y-t-e-s originals. Yeah. Well, I thank you so much for the time, you can check Emily out of course and the various work. She’s involved in especially Cyberpunk 2077 where she plays pan am Palmer Emily. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for having me.