Sena Bryer is a voice actor, writer, and director. She has numerous voice credits in video games, automated dialogue replacement (ADR), audiobook narration, commercials, live action, and theater. In addition, she has written or cowritten several games and has directed or been involved in directing games, an animated musical film, and the audio dramatizations of science fiction and fantasy novels she wrote.
Daily Dragon (DD): Welcome, Sena! When did you first realize you wanted to be an actor, and what path did you follow into that career?
Sena Bryer (SB): I did some theater as a kid, but I didn’t really realize I wanted to be an actor until I started college. Unfortunately, that was also the time that I was about to come out as trans, and the industry was not a place I could be both trans and an actor (Maddie Blaustein famously was nearly fired as the voice of Meowth when she came out, around the same time) so I picked the former and put acting aside. It wasn’t until around 12ish years later when I had moved to LA (for different reasons) and thought “Hey, I’m in the city; maybe I should try doing the acting thing again.” From then I just slowly climbed up the ladder until I got where I am now.
DD: Did you start with acting and then add directing and writing? Or was the sequence different? How did you come to be doing all three?
SB: Writing absolutely came first. I was writing books in elementary school ,even. I tell people often that if I could never do acting again, it would suck but I’d live. If I could never do writing again, I’d go insane. Directing came much, much later, when I began my own project and simply needed to learn how to direct other actors.
DD: What do you find rewarding about voice acting in particular?
SB: Unironically, being in a sound-treated room. The background noise that you subconsciously learn to block out going away is such a great feeling. But a better answer would probably be getting to play such a wide range of characters. In live-action, because how you look is such a factor, you’re much more limited in who you can realistically play. Not so with voice acting.
DD: When you’ve performed ADR, have you replaced your own dialogue, replaced other actors, or both?
I don’t think I’ve ever had to replace my own dialogue; I’ve only ever done dubbing, live-action and animated. In live-action there’s a lot more listening to what the original actor did because you have to match their emotions much more closely than in animated.
DD: If you’re replacing another actor’s voice, are there any factors you have to be especially careful about?
SB: I’ve never been cast to replace another actor! Haven’t had that yet in my career. Honestly, I’m kind of glad for that—I think there’s way too much recasting going on these days in games and in anime, especially with older women.
DD: Was there a role you found especially enjoyable or especially challenging?
SB: Wuk Lamat [in Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail] will always be so near and dear to my heart, and it’ll take a lot to reach those heights again, but I’ve already got a character on the horizon (that I still can’t talk about) that I equally adore. Gosh I hope I get to talk about that one soon.
DD: For the roles you’ve performed live, is your approach to the parts any different than it is when you’re doing voice acting only?
SB: It has been SO long since I’ve performed live (I think about 15 years now?) that I have gotten suuuuper rusty with it. Unless you count filling in for 5 seconds of footage for a monster scene for a webseries. That was fun. I’d love to do more of that stuff.
DD: What’s the appeal of writing for you?
SB: It’s not enough for me to just have a cool idea in my head; I gotta be able to share it with others. I grew up going to a yearly storytelling festival in town, so the act of telling stories is just ingrained in me. It’s also just a fantastic creative outlet in general. It’s like how if you bottle up your feelings they eventually burst, but with stories. I gotta get them out of my head.
DD: For more information about Sena Bryer and her work, visit her website, https://senabryer.com.
