EW – Get an exclusive look at how the actors, including The Lighthouse star Willem Dafoe, recorded video game roles during a pandemic.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’s Daisy Ridley, It Chapter Two’s James McAvoy, and The Lighthouse’s Willem Dafoe lead the voice cast for Twelve Minutes, which begins with one man’s attempt to have a romantic evening at home with his wife (Ridley). The man (McAvoy) — all names are withheld from the player at the start to maintain mystery — witnesses a violent home invasion when an intruder (Dafoe) storms their apartment and knocks him out. The man then wakes up 12 minutes earlier, an experience that will repeat itself until he’s able to figure out the truth behind this tragic event and, hopefully, prevent it from happening altogether.
Not even Ridley knows quite what the ending holds. She may have recorded her lines, but the script, at least to a novice, can be a maze. It looks more like a flowchart, which makes it hard for Ridley to remember all the different dialogue she recorded for what seems, after weeks of four-hour afternoon sessions, like an infinite amount of loops.
In her final recording, in August, Ridley sits in a recording booth in London’s Soho neighborhood as sound technicians idle behind her in masks and Antonio directs her remotely over Zoom from his San Francisco home. “There’s just a lot of story,” she says after one particularly grueling voice-over session performing a series of physical responses (grunts, screams, pants). “It’s pretty dark,” she adds. “It goes from being this very joyous, immediate thing to this pretty dark warren of various options. It’s cool because you as the player are learning more, so you’re trying to figure out more.“