Maleok here with an interview with another one of the talents behind a champion's voice. This time I had the privilege of chatting with Marcella Lentz-Pope who voices Lamb of the champion Kindred. Marcella truly is a renaissance woman who does work in voiceover, film, and theater! I talked with her about her work in voiceover specifically as well as what went in to creating the voice of Lamb!

Photo from Marcella's IMDB

Firstly can you tell the audience about yourself and some of your major roles?

Marcella: I was born and raised in Los Angeles to actor parents so I literally grew up in this industry. My dad was a big VO actor known for voicing Goofy for 12 years at Disney, the annoying (and yet lovable) toy, Furby, the first voice you hear in "Back to the Future" and 100's of cartoons, video games, anime and movies. And my mom does everything; She's worked with Sofia Coppola and Rob Reiner and then on the opposite side of the spectrum you can hear her narrate "The Simpsons" and voice characters in "Bob's Burgers" and "Rick & Morty". My parents are pretty cool but don't tell them I said that. Growing up I didn't know there were other jobs or options besides acting and that suited me perfectly. When I wasn't in school I was going to my parents auditions and sitting in recording booths doing my homework while they worked. I started doing voice overs when I was 8 and on camera work when I was 12, but I was not a "child actor". Most recently you can hear me as Moira Burton in 'Resident Evil', Ramsey (from 'The Good Dinosaur') in Disney Infinity 3.0, Big Hero 6, Elder Scrolls and of course Kindred in League of Legends. And if listening to weird voices isn't your thing, you can also see me in The Social Network, Superbad and as Mae Capone on Boardwalk Empire. I have a couple video games coming out at the beginning of this year, but gosh darn it, I can't talk about them quite yet. I spend my time between New York and Los Angeles, going where the work takes me.

Do you have a favorite type of acting? If so, then why.

Marcella: That’s tricky...no I don’t. I love acting in general. I just love it. I love it. I love being on-stage. I love the thrill of being in front of a live audience. I love doing voiceover work, because I feel like that’s my family’s work, what my family has been doing, and I feel a very close connection with that, and I always feel very close to my dad whenever I have any sort of job. I love making awesome movies. It’s just so much fun to be on a movie set. It’s so hard...you can’t pick because they’re all just so very different, completely different, and you get a high from each one in a completely different way, but voiceovers are what I’ve been doing the longest, for sure.

Focusing on voice acting, what is your favorite part about doing voice work?

Marcella: Hmm...other than being able to wear your pajamas to work? *laughs* I like how on the spot everything is. It’s actually really fun, which might be kind of hard for some people. I enjoy the fact that you get to the set and you don’t have any idea what your lines are going to be. You haven’t read the script. You don’t know what they want. Sometimes it’s been 6 months or so since your audition, so you don’t even know what you did and you’ll have to hear a reference of “Okay, what did I do? I don’t even know what this project is,” because sometimes they give you different names for projects. I like that kind of adrenaline going in and then them showing me “Hey, this is what you did. Do that. Here’s 200 pages for the next 4 hours. Let’s get to it.” It might take a few minutes to get into a groove, but I love going line by line, just one take, one take, one take. It’s fast. It’s fun. The environment with voiceovers in the recording booth, the engineering booth, as well as where I am, it’s so much more casual than I think anywhere else. It’s just fun, especially when you start working a lot and working at the same studios, you get to know everybody and you see them once or twice a month, and it’s like a really small family. Unless you’re doing a show all the time, the same show and getting to know the same people, you don’t really get that. So yeah, it’s pretty special with voiceovers.

Moving on, did you specifically audition for Riot Games, or was it simply another job opportunity?

Marcella: No, I don’t seek anything out. Auditions and work will usually come through my agent. Sometimes it’ll come through a director that I’ve worked with or a studio that I’ve worked with. In this case, Kris Zimmermann, the director of what we did here with League of Legends, I’ve worked with her for many years and done a lot of video games with her, and she is awesome. She’s my favorite voiceover/video game director, hands down. She’s so freakin’ cool. Now we kind of have a shorthand where I know how she works, she knows how I work, it’s just great. I love working with her. So she had called me for this, I remember. I came in, and I don’t think I knew what it was for...I can’t remember if they told us or not, most of the time they don’t tell us. I just came in and they’re like “Okay, we’re kind of going for this ethereal, young, sweet, but she’s insanely intelligent and crazy thing. Let’s just play around and do whatever.” It was like, I don’t know, most auditions are just a few minutes, so this was somewhere around 3 – 5 minutes. Did it, sounded cool, that was it, in and out. *laughs*

Would you consider yourself a gamer?

Marcella: This is so embarrassing. I am so bad with games. I am so bad with anything technology-wise. I am so bad with computers. I could not even get my Skype on my computer to work to talk to you right now, that’s how bad I am. *laughs* So I love doing video games, that’s probably my favorite medium within voiceovers to do. I love it. I also just love the people who play the video games. They’re seriously the nicest people, and I get so many sweet messages and letters from people. So I love doing video games. I am so bad at it. That being said, I have a group of friends who all work at Blizzard. It’s really cool. So whenever I’m doing a game or whatnot, I’ll tell them what I’m doing and they’ll be like “oh my god that’s the biggest game ever! That’s so amazing!” and I’ll be like “What? I don’t know.” *laughs* It’s kind of embarrassing, but I am in the gaming world because of them and because of what I do. I just wish I knew how to play.

Were you aware just how immense League of Legends was going into your audition?

Marcella: Nooo. *laughs* Here’s a quick little fun fact. When I got the job, I recorded at this one studio that I do a lot of video games through, and I deal with this one woman all the time, and in that particular month I had done about 2 or 3 other video games with them, and I got an email with the subject line "LoL booking.” I thought she was saying “hahaha you booked another job. I’m talking to you again because you booked something else.” It literally took 3 or 4 messages back and forth where I’m like “I have no idea what this is for” and she’s like “Oh no, it’s for LoL.” I’m like “Oh, League of Legends...LoL.” *laughs* So that’s also embarrassing. My whole life is one big embarrassing fact.

Did you like Lamb as a character when you were reading for Kindred?

Marcella: Oh my god, I loved her! She was so awesome. She’s kind of creepy, at least that’s how I see her, because she is this very soft, melodic, sweet-natured thing but then she’ll just kill you without a blink of an eye and that’s that. It’s really kind of psychotic, but there’s just something...it’s evil, but she’s beautiful, you know? When we were recording it, I didn’t really have anything to go off of what she looked like. They showed me a very basic picture in the first session (we did 2 sessions). For the second session, they were drawing things based on my voice and what I was doing, so they were kind of designing it through what I was doing and I thought that was really cool, being like “Oh wow, my voice is inspiring you to make her like this.” But yeah, I love her, she’s awesome. I’m referring to her as she even though technically there’s not necessarily a sexual connotation, but for these purposes I’m just going to call her she. Technically she’s just a being. She’s death itself. It’s so much cooler than just the reaper with a scythe. I think it’s smarter. Kindred together, both Lamb and Wolf, is such an intelligent character, and I think video games right now are really on a precipice of something huge. The work is just getting better and better, and more complicated and intense, and the artistry...oh my god. It is so amazing. I have so much appreciation for it. Seriously, I should sit down one day and have someone teach me how, but it’ll take more than one day...it would take a while. *laughs* You have no idea when you’re in the booth how it’s going to turn out. A lot of the time you have no idea what they’re even going for and what they want, and we’re just figuring it out as it goes along. To see the final project and then to hear that people really do like what you came up with, it’s awesome. That’s what you do this for. I love entertaining people and making people happy. That’s just like the coolest thing ever, you know?

What was the process like working with Matt Mercer and how closely did you two work together during recording?

Marcella: Oh Matt, I love Matt. I’m bicoastal, I’m in New York and LA, doing work in both places. So I flew into LA a couple weeks ago to do another video game that I can’t talk about, but it’s coming out soon. Matt’s in it as well, and our sessions were back to back, so afterwards we went and had dinner and caught up and had such a good time. We’re actually talking about possibly a Lamb and Wolf panel, if we can get enough interest in it. A lot of people have been contacting both of us with questions, and we were like “Let’s just get together and talk with people and answer whatever they want to know.” So how it worked with Matt...this was something that was pretty special and unique to League of Legends and Riot. I haven’t experienced this before. Usually what happens with a session is no matter how many characters are in one scene together, everyone records separately. You have your own sessions. So for this one, we each had sessions where we were alone and we had sessions where we were together. There were 2 separate days where we did this. We had an initial recording where I came in first, recorded a bit of my stuff, then Matt came in and we both worked together, then I left and he finished his. Then we basically did the same thing maybe a month or so later. We hadn’t really sunk in to what it really was and we needed to go again, so we did it again. That time, there were tons of people from Riot and a group of like 10 of us, which is pretty big to be in a session, and we all were like “Oh yeah, this is it. We can totally hear it click.” We got our groove. So what happened when we were recording together, we were in the same room, we each had our own mic, and we were playing off each other, which just does not happen in the voiceover world, and it was so cool. There are a couple lines where I can’t remember if I was actually with him or by myself, but then there are others where that was me solo, and that was me playing off of Matt. It was just awesome; you don’t get to do that.

Photo from Marcella's IMDB

This applies to Kindred more than most other champions, what is it like to know that your voice is being heard by tens of thousands of players every day?

Marcella: I didn’t know that until about 2 seconds ago when you told me. *laughs* I mean honestly, part of is just oh, well that’s my job. Then the other part of me thinks it’s just awesome, but I’m also thinking of how many people are going “oh my god, I want to kill myself. This girl’s voice is so annoying. I’m so tired of hearing it over and over again.” After a certain point, I feel like you’ve got to get this girl out of your ear. Hopefully more people are enjoying it than thinking that. It’s really cool though. This is great getting all this from you, because I have no idea how it looks or sounds or plays with anyone.

Overall what would you say about working with riot? And how important do you think it will be for your career moving forward?

Marcella: Over the past couple years I’ve been doing a lot more video games and really getting into those, so I think if anything this will just help me with more in the video game world. You have a freedom with video games as well with the voices and with coming up with things. Of course, there’s the director and they guide you along and they let you know that you’re slipping out of the voice or this is happening and it’s great, but there is this kind of “create your own world” with it that is so fun. I definitely think that this will carry me down that path more. In regards to Riot, they’re just so cool and friendly and sweet. You can tell that everyone who works there loves what they do, and they geek out over their own stuff all the time, and it’s so awesome to see that. When we were recording, having the artists there to talk to...they were so excited! It was their baby. They were so excited that everything was coming up. It didn’t feel at all like work. It didn’t feel like a job. We were all just in there having fun, laughing, joking around, just having a good time in coming up with this awesome character in this awesome world. Not every company is like that. It’s not a serious atmosphere. Voiceovers in general are usually not a very serious atmosphere, since it is a much more casual world, but with Riot and these sessions with League of Legends specifically, it was just so calm and relaxed. I didn’t ever feel like “I’ve got to do my best. Oh no, I messed up that line and they’re going to hate me.” They were just so...I’m overusing the word cool here, but they’re pretty cool. *laughs*

Finally do you think voice acting is something you will do for the rest of your life?

Marcella: Of course! I’ve been doing voice acting technically since I was in my mother’s womb, because she was doing work while she was pregnant with me, so I’m pretty sure I’ll die in the booth. *laughs* Like my character will be dying, and I’m going to actually die, and they’ll just applaud. That’ll be me, for sure.

Thank you so much for your time Marcella! You were a joy to interview and we really hope to see more of your work in the future! Kindred is a very unique champion mostly because of your hard work! If you would like to follow Marcella on social media you can find her Facebook here. To see other roles she has done check out her IMDB page here