I hadn’t realised this, but most of the actors in the original Resident Evil weren’t credited at the end of the game. I’m talking about both the voice actors and the real life actors who played a part in the game’s cutscenes, which used real world actors. An ongoing effort from many fans of the series has been trying to locate every single actor from the games, in March 2019 the actress who played Rebecca Chambers was located, just over 23 years after the game originally released.
If you weren’t aware, the voice actor for Rebecca Chambers is not the same as this live action actor. Rebecca’s voice actor was one of the first from Resident Evil to be found, Lynn Harris, who also voices the game’s self-destruct sequence, and also did some work in Time Crisis. While some of the actors also did the voice work for other characters in Resident Evil, this wasn’t the case for Rebecca Chambers, as you can see below.
Harris was actually integral in the development of Resident Evil. She was the Voice Acting Director, meaning she had an influence on which actors were chosen to voice characters, even though she didn’t have the final say.
Finding the actress who portrayed Rebecca Chambers in the flesh came about through the Raccoon Stars Blog, a Resident Evil fan site. The owner was put in touch with someone named Linda X, who as it turns out is definitely the actress behind Rebecca Chambers. Just look at her image below.
Linda X actually responded to quite a few questions from Racoon Stars Blog, revealing a little of what it was like behind the scenes. She explained how she didn’t really remember a lot about the job because at the time, when she was working in Japan, she would get into a car, go to ten to twelve castings, and then go home to sleep. Her schedule was crazy, and she never got to see half the work she did because it was either never published outside of Japan, or she was just too busy. The first time she’d seen her work on Resident Evil was this year!
Astoundingly, Linda X had no idea she’d been part of the creation of such a huge franchise, but then again if she’s not into games then why would she? She described how as part of the job she’d had her hair dyed to look like it does in the game, even though she was naturally blonde, which was quite an attractive feature in the region at the time. Regardless, she says that she had loads of fun working on the game, and in every job in Japan, because everyone was so nice to her. With such a culture of crunch, and so much bad press about game developers in 2019, this is a really nice tidbit to have from a bygone era.
All of this information and more is in a detailed video from Whang! You should definitely check out their channel, but the video is below for you to enjoy right now.
