Ladies and gentlemen, I’m a bit emotionally charged up after reading the latest tweets from Hellena Taylor. In case you missed it, Taylor was the voice of Bayonetta for the first two games and recently caused an online storm when she revealed that Platinum Games, the dev company, offered her a mere $4,000 to voice the entirety of Bayonetta 3. It started a groundbreaking interest and conversation in the amount voice actors are paid, and how talent is often thrown to the side in favor of paying whoever has more clout the highest *cough Chris Pratt’s Mario cough*. However, the story got a bit shaky when a Bloomberg report came out a few days ago alleging that Taylor received a much higher offer, approximately fifteen to twenty thousand dollars. Still, that was a report from third parties and while it was corroborated by multiple sources, I still wasn’t ready to grab a pitchfork. Until now that is.
Recently Taylor must have felt pressure from the Bloomberg report so she came out with a series of Tweets to defend herself. Ironically, this is what sealed the nail in the coffin that she has been spreading misinformation and lying. If you watch her first and most popular video, she claims that “the final offer to do the whole game as a buyout, a flat rate, was $4,000 U.S. dollars”. And I just transcribed that quote myself while listening to it so I wouldn’t fuck it up. Now the problem here is, in one of her recent tweets as you see above, the story has changed completely. The offer has magically transformed into $10,000. Hmm, that’s a bit different. In subsequent tweets she says that after rejecting that, Hideki Kamiya then offered a bonus 5k to make it $15,000 for the role. She rejected it again, and then later states Platinum replied one more time 11 months later to ask about doing “some lines”, likely the aforementioned cameo, for $4,000. Ah, there’s that 4k number. So what the fuck is going on here? 15k is 11k more than 4k, so… did she forget which number she was talking about in the first video when she called for a boycott of the third game?
Oh don't worry, eyes have been opened.
While many details are still unknown, for example how many lines/hours of voicework she was expected to perform for the listed compensation, one thing is now certain. Whether intentionally or not, she spread massive disinformation about Platinum Games, and called for a boycott, and fueled everything but an attack on Hideki Kamiya and her replacement Jennifer Hale, while not even bothering to either tell the truth or double check her tweets to make sure they were accurate. These kinds of allegations are nothing to sneeze at so if you make them, you need to come into the situation with your I’s dotted and your T’s crossed which obviously didn’t happen. At this point everything is now in question. Fans of the series were quick to pile on that the $450 million dollar evaluation Taylor gave it seems very far-fetched and pulled out of her ass. Now that it’s clear Taylor gave the wrong information once, it’s plausible she screwed up that number too. Ultimately her honesty is now called into question and it will be difficult to convince anyone who isn’t braindead to blindly believe what she tweets anymore.
Well, this will only serve to further be a reason to attack voice actors for wanting more pay. Many already don’t see it as something worthy of decent money anyway, and this will be more fuel to that fire. Taylor’s lack of transparency has not only hurt her own reputation, but the movement to ask for better pay for VAs in general. Are you interested in the Bayonetta games? Will other VAs be affected by this damaging incident? Does Taylor even realize she played herself with her own contradiction? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
