Do it or don’t do it – there’s no trying when you’re an actor directing a game like this Star Wars Outlaws.
First, it’s Star Wars, a franchise whose most ardent fans fight daily for the series’ legacy, often at the expense of the talent involved. The actual work – the motion capture, the voice work, the intertwining of performance and acting – is isolating, and an actor can only hope to convey enough soul to the digital artists who fully portray a playable character. And then the hype surrounding the “first open-world Star Wars game” raises the stakes.
None of this made Humberly González shy when she landed the role of Kay Vess in Ubisoft’s AAA tentpole.
“I didn’t put any pressure on myself that it was Star Wars. It didn’t scare me,” González says as she dials into the set of her new Netflix series in North Carolina on a September morning. The waterfront. “I felt like this was the type of project that would potentially spark different conversations that could be polarizing, but ultimately there aren’t many opportunities for Latinas to lead a Star Wars project. I was very proud.”
The 32-year-old Venezuelan actor has spent the last decade appearing in Netflix film projects large and small Jupiter’s legacy And Ginny and Georgia to lead Christmas with friends and familyHallmark’s first lesbian holiday romance, and the role of the victim of a murderous supernatural being last summer Tarot. But Star Wars Outlaws Was The This job, says González, is “the big opportunity for me to show what I can do after the last nine years of my career.”
If anything, Star Wars was the icing on the cake of a bigger dream: starring in a video game.
Image: Massive Entertainment/Ubisoft
When she landed the role of fugitive villain Kay Vess, González already had a number of Ubisoft games under her belt, including roles in Starlink: Battle for Atlas, Far Cry 6And Avatar: Borders of Pandora. González’s mocap experience goes back even further than professional jobs – she was a true student of the game performance craft.
During her third year at the National Theater School of Canada in Montreal, González took part in a workshop with Ubisoft where students were given the opportunity to perform in a motion capture tape and perform in the camera rigs. “We wore the suits and did knock-off themes from other games like Splinter Cell and stuff like that,” she says. “When I found out this was part of the job, I thought: I love it. I am a very physical person. I love theater. I love how creative it was that I didn’t have to rely on anything other than my imagination. And I’ve always been the kind of actor where I don’t have to spend a lot of time believing that something is happening in front of me.”
For all its stealth quests, sabacc tournaments, and decadent eating mini-games, Star Wars Outlaws depends on González’s performance as Kay Vess to make it more of a character-driven adventure than a typical open-world experience. And while the initial missions fulfill the promise of a “Han Solo simulator,” González wanted to deviate from that to emulate Harrison Ford’s roguelike precedent. Unlike Han in the original trilogy, Kay is alone, resorts to crime, and is forced out of her home in Canto Bight after a robbery gone wrong. González saw potential in deviating from the archetype: she wanted to play that classic villain, but as a newcomer. She wanted to be fierce but defensive. Kay is a risk-taker but vulnerable.
While the game of Outlaws For González, evolution was part of a journey of survival, complete with a reconciliation with the past. As bounty hunters pursue Kay across the galaxy, the memories (and current exploits) of a mother who taught her the art of thievery emerge.
“She just has the ability to adapt and make mistakes, but not bring about the downfall,” González says. “It’s understandable in a way that she could just be any normal person. It really could be you or me or anyone playing the game – she doesn’t have the power. She’s not capable of taking on the biggest and baddest in the galaxy, but her resilience and fearlessness get her there, and she’s not afraid to keep going even when she fails.”
Image: Massive Entertainment/Ubisoft
None of this was clear when González auditioned Star Wars Outlaws Because after more than five months of scene work and chemistry readings over Zoom, she never knew she would be auditioning for a Star Wars game. “I thought I was auditioning Westworld!” González says of the pages of generic Space Cowboy material she tore through during the rigorous review process. And it wasn’t until she read with Jay Rincon, the actor from Kay’s droid cohort ND-5, that she learned the marathon was here Outlawsand Ubisoft wanted her for Kay.
González believes her “it” factor was simply her “natural self.” When Ubisoft finally revealed Kay to her, she felt completely on the same page from the start. “It’s hard for an actor not to get attached to a role until you’ve booked it,” she says, “but I really felt like this was me and this was meant for me.”
Star Wars is set in a galaxy far, far away, but González could immediately identify with Kay as a Venezuelan who left her own country at a young age. “Kay has these abandonment issues, being on her own and kind of shut out from the rest of the world and feeling like everything is being rigged against her… I think about the political unrest in my country, I think about the alienation that I feel family from my country and the fact that I always wanted more for myself. When you grew up with nothing, how do you actually make ends meet? My family grew up in extreme poverty and we were the first to ever emigrate and leave the country. It was a very scary, unknown world out there where I didn’t even know English when I left. So there was a big risk. It was a lot about facing your fears, the resilience that comes from upbringing, and taking care of yourself in a place where all you really had was yourself.”
The Latin American experience gave González a foothold in the Star Wars universe, and her life as an open and proud queer woman overshadowed it. Although the game is not a love story, González believes that her own performance and the work of author Nikki Foy give Kay an implicit queer identity. As she puts it: “If you feel it, it’s right.
“I think everyone definitely notices that she met Selo [the speeder mechanic] and she’s all structured and nervous and that energy influences her,” González says. “Even with Vail [the bounty hunter] – there is also an energy. It doesn’t have to be obvious, but if you notice it, isn’t that just human behavior? It’s relationships, it’s energy.”
The other defining trait González and Kay have in common might be that they wouldn’t go anywhere without their favorite furry companions. The actor never saw Nix, the mischievous Merqaal who aids Kay in pickpocketing stormtroopers, as a pet, but as a real accomplice. The Ubisoft team deepened this connection for González by portraying Nix as a real puppet, as opposed to the original plan of a blue stuffed animal on a stick. Brought to life on the mocap stage by puppeteer Camille Loiselle-D’Aragon, Nix had eyes, hair and all the character he has in the game, which fully captured González’s imagination as a passionate dog lover.
When González left Venezuela – “started over, bet on me becoming an actor, had no family in the country, had no one but myself” – she finally found security in her Bichon Frize Shih Tzu, Oreo. He is absolutely, says González, the rubbish for her, Kay. “Literally me and my dog are everywhere I go,” she says. “I’ve had him for 14 years, so that relationship connects me.”
An actor has never won an Oscar or an Emmy for playing a character in a Star Wars saga, but few have had more than 17 hours – and a reported 11,376 lines – to flesh out their character between lightsaber duels and blaster fire. (And that doesn’t count the future DLC that González is still working on at the North Carolina studios.) This year’s Game Awards could address the franchise’s lack of acting prestige if González follows suit Jedi: SurvivorCameron Monaghan enters the performance category and actually gets a win. This is an honor for an actor who sees gaming not as a stepping stone to great work, but rather as an avenue through which great work can be done. Despite the massive amount of animation required to bring Kay to life, González knows how much effort it takes to actually appear and be in a game – and she says it’s her live-action acting has changed for the better.
“I just have to focus on my own performance,” she says. “At the end of the day, they’re looking for all of these nuances. We did so many facial scans. There is even a process [that lasts] For hours I just read a sentence or was told an emotion how to read the sentence. And we did it in every possible emotion just so we could calculate all the micro movements in Kay’s face. And it was such an intense process that we spent hours working out all the possible movements so that the animators would have options. But my focus is on telling the story and making sure I’m as compelling as any story I’ve ever told in my career.”
