Zelda voice actress Patricia Summersett revealed the inspirations behind her performance in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, as well as two other games in the long-running franchise. Her insights into the coveted role arrive shortly after Tears of the Kingdom launched to immense commercial success, critical acclaim, and fan adoration.
Summersett first played the English voice of Zelda in 2017's Breath of the Wild before reprising that role for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, a 2020 spinoff in the vein of the Dynasty Warriors games. She was only confirmed to be returning for Tears of the Kingdom a few weeks ahead of the game's May 12 release.
In a newly published interview with Axios, the 41-year-old actress revealed that her Zelda performance was influenced by a multitude of iconic TV and movie characters. More specifically, she said she was inspired by Emilia Clarke's Daenerys Targaryen from HBO's Game of Thrones, as well as Emma Watson's Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter movies. Summersett's Zelda voice also contains "a little bit" of Mia Farrow's Unicorn from The Last Unicorn, the actress revealed. Mia Farrow is an avid gamer and subsequently took to Twitter to share that she was delighted to learn that her 1982 performance inspired this latest rendition of Zelda.
Asked about her experiences bringing three Zelda games to life, the American-Canadian actress couldn't reveal much due to standing NDAs. She did, however, confirm that her Nintendo collaborations were always handled by the company's U.S. branch. Since Summersett was technically part of the English localization teams for Tears of the Kingdom, Breath of the Wild, and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, she never even got to meet Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma.
The actress also wasn't given any heads-up about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom being in the works, having only found out about the Breath of the Wild sequel in mid-2019 along with the rest of the fandom. Back then, Nintendo released an E3 teaser for the then-unnamed game which featured no spoken lines but did include a brief glimpse of Zelda.
Summersett, whose game voice acting credits span back to 2007, told Axios that's a fairly standard industry practice, not least because any given game needs to reach a certain point of completion before its developers can feasibly start recording voice lines. That apparently wasn't the case in 2019, when Tears of the Kingdom was still in an early stage of development.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available now on Switch.