Resident Evil: Village
In 2021, developers and players alike fell in love with Capcom's Resident Evil: Village. You can credit the game's fresh setting, new kinds of monsters, and tense gameplay for driving over 5 million in sales. But one of the game's most celebrated characters was Lady Dimitrescu: an exceptionally tall vampire who vamps her way through a gothic castle with campy energy and memorable dialogue.
At DICE 2022, actress Maggie Robertson accepted the award for "outstanding achievement in character" for her portrayal of Dimitrescu. In a roundtable interview with Game Developer and other outlets, Robertson shared some insight not only on her choices that helped bring Dimitrescu to life
—but also what life has been like embodying a fan-favorite character that finds a new life on the internet.
Robertson wasn't just the voice of Dimitrescu, she also jumped in the motion capture suit to provide reference data for Resident Evil: Village's animation team. The character's face belongs to model Helena Mankowska, but when you're watching Dimitrescu chew the scenery—that's all Robertson.
Dimitrescu was Robertson's first major video game role. She'd done some prior mocap work on First Watch Games' Rogue Company, but Dimitrescu was her first chance to fully inhabit a unique character. She explained that preparing for the role meant drawing on a lot of her training as a stage performer. "It's all about the storytelling of your body," she explained. "You don't have sets, or costumes, or makeup to tell the story for you."
She leaned on techniques like "animal work" and "animal studies" to define 's Dimitrescu's movements. She thought of the character as "catlike," and used feline movement as the starting point for her own motions.
"She's gonna be more
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