The acting in HBO Max’s The Last of Us is incredible. Pedro Pascal gives an understated but layered performance as Joel. Bella Ramsey is now the definitive Ellie (with the original Ellie still having an important part to play). Then there’s Bill, Frank, and the other unforgettable characters who only appear in an episode or two.
But in any series, there are talented actors whom you might never even notice. See, for example, the Clickers.
Victims of the second stage of the mind-controlling Cordyceps infection, Clickers shamble around with large mushroom plumes sprouting out of their foreheads. Since their eyes are obscured by fungus—or gone completely, it’s hard to tell—Clickers use echolocation to hunt down their prey. You could be forgiven for thinking that their screeching and clicking noises were purely the work of Foley artists, but they’re actually produced in the throats of living, breathing humans.
Misty Lee and Phillip Kovats, the two voice actors who voiced the Clickers in the original Last of Us video game, returned to voice their counterparts in the HBO Max adaptation. In an interview with Polygon, Lee revealed that she didn’t just record the clickers’ voices. She actually helped develop the sound itself.
When I started [recording voices for The Last of Us game], I went into the booth and they were like, We’re looking for some sounds. These are some of the creatures in this game we’re working on. We don’t quite know what they sound like … We started experimenting, and I started doing stuff for them. When we happened on the clicking noise, they went, Wait a minute. Stop that. Can you change that up? Can you do it over and over and over again? We just found that sound.
Now, a new video has surfaced on twitter showing Lee and Kovats at work for the HBO series.
It’s hard to overstate the amount of work, practice, and talent that goes into voice acting. Even though we only heard Lee and Kovats’s voices onscreen for a few minutes total, they left an unforgettable mark on The Last of Us.
(featured image: HBO Max)
