“I’d see my Great Dane everywhere – dead, dead, dead dead.”
Returnal actor Jane Perry is explaining the process behind her performance – how she would slip into the mindset of a character trapped in a limbo, forced to explore a landscape littered with her own corpses.
“I would start to imagine people that I cared about,” she says.
“This is not always a great way to go about your acting, especially when you’re playing dark things. We can draw on our own psychology, but that can get a little dangerous – you can open up Pandora’s box. You have to make sure that you’ve got boundaries around that because your own psychology can start to become frayed. So I would do that sometimes, but I’d be careful not to take it home with me.”
Perry plays Selene, Returnal’s protagonist – a middle-aged scientist who’s lived a full life before she crashlands on planet Atropos, she’s caught in a time loop, and she’s forced to live thousands more. Every time Selene dies, she’s resurrected right back where she started, and each death sees her psyche gradually slip away.
It isn’t just this slow descent into madness that makes Selene interesting, though. It’s the fact she’s a character with baggage. She has visible wrinkles on her face, and she brings an entire history with her to Atropos. Unpacking that is arguably a more compelling mystery than the secrets of the planet itself.
Unlike her role as Diana Burnwood in the Hitman series, Selene didn’t come naturally to Perry.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is serious stuff,’” Perry remembers. “I found it really hard right from the get-go – from the audition. When I did that audition, I was like, ‘I don’t think I stand a hope in hell of landing this.’”
It’s not just the dark material that makes her a challenging character to play, though. All alone on Atropos (if you don’t count the tentacled nightmares trying to murder her), she basically carries the entire story on her back. Every single iteration of her back, in fact.
“She’s processing things on her own and going through a mental journey,” Perry says. “My preparation was understanding mentally how it feels to go through these chapters of her life, continually returning to the same place, and trying to bring truth to the constant reverberation of this trauma and the impact that it has on how she delivers her scout logs or processes with what’s going on around her.”
This wasn’t a linear process. Much like the game, which tells its story in a disjointed, fragmented way – a technique that puts the player in the mind of Selene – the voice work was done out of order. One minute, Perry might be Selene iteration ten – a version of Selene who’s still got a grasp on who she was – and the next she might be Selene 2,000, a character who’s experienced thousands of deaths and is almost unrecognizable to the protagonist who lands on Atropos. Perry would get as much context and help as possible from the writers and director, but there isn’t anyone on this Earth but you who can make your mind go full Selene 2,000.
“I’d slip into a dreamlike state, which then became a nightmare,” Perry says. “Sometimes when you have a dream or nightmare, it stays with you when you wake up. It creeps up on you throughout the day. I would establish the nightmare and then I would allow myself to revisit it over and over and over again.
“I got there sometimes with the help of my director Damien Goodwin. Both Damien and the game director, Gregory Loudon, would paint the picture so well. Those moments where she really loses it, I was helped there by my colleagues who’ve been setting the scene. So a lot of it was collaborative, and then me just dropping into this nightmarish sensation.”
Perry’s performance is well worthy of the BAFTA she won for ‘best leading role’. Nuanced and powerful, she masterfully carries this strange, purposely disjointed story, pulling players through hundreds of deaths, kicking and screaming until you’ve finally finished the last alien monstrosity in our way of getting off-planet. When you’re unceremoniously transplanted right back, it’s hard to even be mad about it. Now that you know how many imaginary Great Danes it took to get you here, you can head back with a newfound sense of appreciation when Returnal comes to PC.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
