Interview with Jennifer Hale
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Jennifer Hale
Canadian-American voice actor and singer known as Commander Shepard in Mass Effect, Samus Aran in Metroid Prime, Jean Grey in X-Men '97 and Disney's Cinderella.
These answers are taken from A Conversation with Jennifer Hale (X-Men '97, Mass Effect, Metal Gear Solid) on Canned Air (The Canned Air Podcast)'s YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with voice acting?
When I was 15, I was working at a plant store, and one day this video production studio came in to do a shoot. I was working in there and I started helping them, and I've always had a good work ethic, and they liked it. So they came back a couple months later and said, you want to come work for us? I think by this time I was probably 17. They happened to be right next door to an audio studio. So one day they just called me over, because I could do a Valley Girl, and I was like, okay, I can do your Valley Girl for you. So I went over and they paid me like 35 bucks, and I was like, I'm sorry, what just happened? Because it took a half an hour.
What drew you to a career in voice over?
My second dad used to call me the little capitalist piglet, because I was always thinking in business terms since I was young. And it's not because I wanted to accumulate all this stuff or all this money. It's because money was safety, and I didn't have that growing up. So something where I could be independent, take care of myself, and be free, that's all I ever wanted, was to be free. That appealed to me. So I saw that opportunity, and boy, I dug in. I was like, oh, this looks good.
What do you enjoy most about voice over?
One of the joyous things about my career is the sheer diversity. Commander Shepard, Cinderella, Princess Morbucks, Bastila Shan. The variety is so fun to me. I love it. Sedusa, insane people. Ravenzella from Unicorn Academy. She's insane and I love it. I'm destroying everything, or I'm saving the world, or I'm a cat. I'm a three-boobed woman on Rick and Morty. Let's go. I love the variety, but there will be a common thread through all of it.
And then you grow that out to Madelyne Pryor and the Goblin Queen. It's the funnest thing ever.
What was a great moment for you as a voice actor?
My first audition for animation: I had just been with SBV for a month, and one of the agents got the idea, in the shower actually, to send me to the callbacks for the cartoon series Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? And I went in, and it was terrifying. Marsha Goodman was doing the callbacks. It was in this conference room, and she's intimidating as hell. And I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing, but I thought, just do it, and I will go whole hog. And I just went whole hog and I just did it, and I booked it, and I was like, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.
How did your voice over career unfold?
Grit and insane persistence and curiosity, and some savvy moves that I'm really happy I made. That studio housed at least two or three local DJs who worked all the time in voiceover. In Birmingham, Alabama, there were five ad agencies that did nothing but small market car commercials, and I got the guys to teach me how to do it. I learned from Greg and Courtney. They were so generous.
At 17, 18 years old, I put on a suit, I put my hair up in a bun, and I cold called ad agencies, sometimes door to door, and it was nauseating. I would mail it, and I would just do what I call the happy pest routine: "Hi, just checking in. I know you're busy. That's okay." By the time I was 20, I was full-time acting. I was like 19 when I started driving over to Atlanta, which was two and a half hours away, so I could work both markets, and that's where I got my first film audition.
By the time I left, I think I was making 75 bucks per radio spot and up to $300 for an on-camera spot, and the volume I had to generate to pay my way and to save up enough money to move to LA was insane. I had hundreds of spots under my belt. I was a trained performer, so I could walk in those booths and do what you need.
What advice do you have for new voice actors?
I made a demo over and over, which is, listen to me, public service announcement: don't do that. The learning curve when you start is like this. I made a demo and I was like, it's really good, and two months later I'm like, oh my god, it's embarrassing, because I've learned so much.
You can't escape practice. You just can't. It's like taking music lessons. You can have your music lesson once a week, but if you don't practice in between, the teacher's not going to do it for you.
Auditioning is the job. If you go into an audition to book it, it shuts you off from huge pieces of yourself that you need. You're going in there to get something, not to give. I always think of the writer. That audition is a chance to breathe life into their work and be of service. That's my job. End of conversation.
I stopped setting output goals years ago. By output goals, I mean, I booked this many jobs, I made this much money. I think it's important to identify the pieces you can control. I can control my input.
How do you take direction and keep communication clear in a remote session?
In games, 90% of it is cold reading. We don't see those words till we walk in to do it. Knights of the Old Republic, I walked in there, I'd never seen the script before. I stand in front of a music stand and I start saying the words. You might do a line from the beginning of the game or the end or the middle, and you just don't know. And you're deeply reliant on our voice director to give you: okay, the room looks like this, you're talking to this person, it's over there, this is your quick history, and go. You don't have any time in between. You just have to make it happen. And it's got to be specific. You can't go in there and go, I think someone would sound like this. Please don't do that.
With X-Men '97 season one, we did a whole record that was very old school, and I left the session going, I don't know if that's going to connect with modern audiences. But the team is extraordinary. I ain't second-guessing this team for a second. When I came back, they're like, we're going to meld it a little bit. And I was like, awesome. Meredith Layne is our voice director, and we just melded it with modern.
Describe your voice and your style.
I like to disappear. I bring in life. I bring in experience. And I never even look at the outcome of anything I do. I don't even think about it. I think about that writer and I think about that world, and just, God, can I please bring as much honest life to this single moment as I possibly can, so when somebody does experience it on the other side, they get to have the fullest experience of what the muse gave to this writer. It's like cooking dinner. It's just cooking people dinner.
With Cinderella, I showed up that day at Disney Character Voices in Burbank, and they had a cassette player of how she sounded. I was a jingle singer before that, and there was a musicality to it, so I learned the musicality. But I'm also, thankfully for this career, an empath. I'd never seen the movie. So I learned it like a jingle, and then I could feel what it feels like to be that person: so hopeful, and still watchful and wary and caring.
Tell me about a read or a character that was hard to get right. What was the job and why was it challenging?
With Dory, Ellen does all the films and I do all the other stuff. It is one of the hardest jobs I do, because pinning her down is tough. She's got Louisiana in there, she's got the Midwest in there, she's got all kinds of things in there. It's one of the very few times when I sit in the booth. With the director who helped me first originate this, we isolated that if I sit and lean to the left, kind of like a banana, and blow out all my air before I start to speak, everything contrary to how I was trained, I get the closest. We just keep trying stuff, and I just keep going at it. And I listen to Ellen in all kinds of contexts: interviews, talk shows, in the role. There's a big difference between Finding Nemo and Finding Dory in a lot of intricate little elements of the performance: the age, the sound of it, the vibe of it.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your demo list.
I wasn't allowed to watch cartoons. The advantage may come from what I did grow up doing instead, which was, I read. I always had my nose in a book. I was always in worlds in my own head. And I was also incredibly isolated as a kid. I had very few friends. I hung out with my dog. I was outside in the trees, doing my own thing, and developing a crap ton of grit. So it really built the inside of this head a lot, and I think that's an asset.
I suck at gaming. I don't play games. I'll watch playthroughs online. I'll watch my nephews play, watch my friends play, but I can't actually do the thing.
At 15, I got a little courage one night and stepped up and sang an old Heart song, and they're like, okay, you can do this. So I ended up joining a different band and we started playing gigs. It was illegal. Nobody cared. It was Alabama. We toured the Southeast a little bit, doing mostly covers, and we wrote our original stuff.
In which area would you like to improve as a voice actor?
I had just moved to LA. I was in my mid-20s, and I'd found an acting class straight away, as all the books had said to do. I was broke as could be. And I was bemoaning the fact that I wasn't as good an actor as I felt like I should be. And thankfully, the universe smacked me upside the head. It was like, stop. You don't get to decide if you're any good right now. In 20 years, you can pass judgment on whether you're any good or not. So sit down and shut up and just keep showing up and working.
I think of that every time I hear stuff like that. It's very humbling. God, I hope I can continue to deserve that kind of regard. I just want to be a little better each time.
What are some of your professional goals for the future?
So many things I want to do. That's the problem. I have probably four songs ready to go. It's just making the plan to get them recorded. I recently just recorded a song for fun, just a private song, and it kind of helped me reconnect to the process again. So I want to do that, and I want to sing live around here on the island where I am. It's just finding the time. It'll happen when I make it a priority. Right now I've got some other things in front of it, and once those are complete, I am so excited to get back to it.
Somebody mentioned we should do a Hex Girls concert, because Jane can still rock it, Kimberly can rock it, and I can. I would love to see that put together.
Jennifer Hale's Full Biography
Jennifer Hale is a Canadian-American voice actress and singer who voiced Commander Shepard from Mass Effect, Samus Aran from Metroid Prime, Killer Frost from Injustice: Gods Among Us, Gladys from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Trinity from The Matrix: Path of Neo, Princess Morbucks, Sedusa and Ms. Keane from The Powerpuff Girls, Flora from Tak and the Power of Juju, Cinderella from various Disney projects and Dory from Finding Nemo video games.