Unlocked! The Nancy Drew Podcast
Moriah Angeline & Ryan Drummond | Episode 003
Dec 9, 2016
We've been making transcripts of the various videos on the Her Interactive YouTube channel, and one that will be a continued series is for the official Nancy Drew Podcast up on their channel. They regularly interviewed people involved with the making of these games.
Click on the link above for the podcast itself.
Some more notes than usual on the episode:
Ironically, Ryan Drummond and Moriah Angeline were (and still are) real-life friends and actors before getting cast opposite each other as Rick and Mattie respectively.
They both worked together at SeaWorld before becoming voice actors, and this was Moriah's first-ever voice-acting gig.
It doesn't sound like either of them actually played the game (which I want to make clear that this is understandable, this is a job for these actors after all. If I were a voice actor, I don't know if I'd play every single game that I had lines in either).
They both claimed they didn't play long enough to get to "the level" where you could hear their respective characters... But you meet Mattie and Rick at the beginning of the game.
Lani Minella was also the vocal coach/director for Stay Tuned for Danger, in addition to being cast as Nancy, the cab drivers, and Millie in this game.
Rick's voice is based on an amalgamation of different people Ryan Drummond ran into within the entertainment industry.
Moriah Angeline based Mattie very much on herself in terms of being a "friendly girl next door" type of character.
Ryan says that he may have seen some images of the characters during production, but it's not clear if that was the case since it was so long ago (both Bob Heath and Scott Carty have said the opposite- that they weren't given any visual materials to work with)
Moriah said that they definitely got descriptions of the characters, however.
Tammy has the two reprise their characters once again at the end of the episode.
Tammy Tuckey (TT): Hello fellow detectives. Welcome back to Unlocked, the official podcast for all things Nancy Drew by Her Interactive. Heads up, there will be spoilers in this episode. I'm your host Tammy Tuckey. And this week we welcome the voices behind two of our favorite Stay Tuned for Danger characters, Moriah Angeline, the voice of Maddie Jensen. And Ryan Drummond, the voice of Rick Arlen, welcome you two!
Ryan Drummond (RD): Hi.
Moriah Angeline (MA): Thanks!
TT: It's great to have you guys on this show. I'm a big fan of Stay Tuned for Danger. For some of us, it's actually our favorite (and first) Nancy Drew game. So it's great to be speaking to the Rick Arlen and the Mattie Jensen. Have you guys ever gotten a chance to speak about Stay Tuned for Danger in the past couple of years?
MA: No, I mean, to be honest, I tried playing the game and I couldn't even get to the level where I could hear myself.
RD: I don't think I ever got to where I was speaking either. I think the opening credits, I nailed those and then after that, it was just all downhill from there.
TT: We've already had Bob Heath on the show, who, as I've already previously stated at the beginning of this podcast, we're gonna have spoilers. Bob was the bad guy in this, in this case,
RD: Such a good guy playing a bad guy.
TT: Yeah, I know! Did you guys get to meet him [Bob Heath] at all or any of the other voice cast, like, before recording or afterwards?
RD: Some of them. We kind of all ran in some of the same circles in Southern California, just the whole voiceover community as it were. I don't believe I met anybody during the recording of Stay Tuned for Danger, except I worked with Lani Minella because she was the the vocal coach on the sessions, so she was in studio at the time. But I've met several other of the cast members just on other projects and back in that same time period.
MA: Yeah, You know, to be honest, that was my first voiceover job, so I think I was taking it all in at the time. As Ryan said, I of course knew Lani and worked with her quite a bit. But if I did meet other voice actors, I only remember Ryan because we were already friends.
RD: Yeah, Mariah and I go back a long way.
TT: And it's interesting. I had no idea that this was your first voiceover job, Moriah.
RD: I didn’t know that either.
TT: How did you both enter the entertainment industry?
MA: I was one of those kids who loved to sing and dance. I was in dance recitals when I was younger and then as I was in junior high and high school, I did theater.
As far as voiceovers, I got in through to voice overs through Ryan. We worked together at SeaWorld for about 3 years and he called me up and said, hey, they're looking for some women, some female voices. And I think you should audition. I think you'd be great at it. And so I did. And Nancy Drew was my first job.
RD: Yeah. Kind of the same, the same story as Moriah. I grew up in a theater family. My parents are both retired theater people, teachers and directors. My father directed me in my first ten shows when I was a kid. And so I've just kind of this is all I've done is entertainment stuff my entire life. In fact, it's kind of funny. There's a there's an actor who works in Southern California, who I won't say him by name just in case, but he grew up and his father was an astronaut for NASA.
And so he lived in a community where all the people who lived on his street, all the fathers were all astronauts. He always tells this funny story where he said he was 12 or 13 years old when he finally realized that not everybody's father became an astronaut. He thought that that's what people did.
They grew up and they became an astronaut. And I kind of had the same deal with the entertainment industry. My parents were always in it. That's all they did and so I just kind of grew up in that environment and it was such a natural progression. It wasn't like I didn't have any other choice of going into any other career.
My parents are very supportive of anything that I wanted to do, but it was just like that's the family business and I started doing shows as soon as I could walk and it hasn't it hasn't ended yet. In in the acting biz, I think that actors are in observant bunch by nature. And so you always are kind of like when you meet people and you do different shows and different projects and you're meeting different people. I think either consciously or subconsciously you're drawing on different things from people to take later on when you need them. And definitely I think Rick is based on a number of people I've met in my life, all you know, drawn into one melted crayon.
TT: And it was interesting, they added like another layer, saying that Rick was truly in love with Maddie and he would write these romantic letters to her, but he would not really reveal that side of him, that romantic, kind side to him. He always had to be Rick Arland, the star, the TV star.
RD: I read that recently and I was just like, I didn't get to that point in the game, so I didn't know that until recently. And I was like, really? Was he? I don't know.
TT: And Mattiewas like the girl next door. Everybody wanted to be friends with her, from what I've heard. Like, they don't even tell you who is the villain until the very, very end. So you kind of have to play it as if each of the characters are pretty much innocent, but how did you go around with your take of Maddie?
MA: Well, yeah, I think, you know, a lot of times when you're recording voice overs, you record all of your lines, so you don't see or hear the lines from any of the other characters. So there is that disconnect that you're really just focused on your own character a lot of the times. With Mattie and the the girl next door feel and the the person that you'd like to talk, sit and talk to (I would I would like to believe without tooting my own horn) that that is the person that I am. So I feel like Mattie was one of the characters closest to Moriah.
Because, you know, not a cartoon voice, not a wizard, not an elf that lives in the woods. But, yeah, that person that you wanna hang out with.
RD: Wait a minute, Moriah, you're not an elf that lives in the woods?!
MA: Well, sometimes I was. Yeah. Just run every other Saturday.
RD: And if I can just echo on what? Moriah, just said-she's right.She's totally right. I've known her for a long, long time. And I think I knew you for two or three years before we did Stay Tuned for Danger. So I can, I can echo that sentiment. That's pretty much the nucleus of Moriah is what you hear in the Mattie character.
MA: We did a lot of games together, but like I said, not together doing different characters, we were in the game, I think this and there's only one other game that we've done together where our characters actually interact,
RD: Which was what? Somebody’s gonna know.
MA: We were the two avatars that might have been it. It was a Russian Russian.Spy game.
RD: Oh Campaign. God, it's kind of familiar with avatars.
MA: But that was the only time that we really were connected (other than Mattie and Rick)
TT: Were the images of the characters presented to you initially at the beginning, or did you get to see them after you did most of the recordings?
RD: For that game? I believe we did have some images, but they also may have been working images, so they may not have been the final animation. But I'd say probably a good solid 50% of the time you have, well, actually closer these days, it's a lot more common to have imagery and and cut scenes and things that you can look at.
But back then, when we were recording this in the late 90s, it was probably just a coin toss whether or not you got a picture of who you were. And sometimes you didn't even get a full script. Like Moriah said earlier, you just get lists of lines, and you have to kind of look towards the director and hopefully there's a Rep there from the game who can tell you in this particular line, you're yelling at someone across the room and this line, you're whispering at someone in this line, you're angry at them in this line. You know, they kind of have to fill in a lot of these blanks.
And I think that's where sometimes the the voice over work from the early years, the the mid to late 90s can get a little funny because sometimes the way you perform something and the take that they took doesn't really match with what the animation ended up in.You know, being. And as far as this game goes, I think we got some pictures of the actual people, but I don't think we had any animation to look at Moriah. Does that jive with what you remember?
MA: Yes, I think we got descriptions. You know, she looks like this and she's this personality. Yeah.
RD: Today it's just a lot more things., I don't know exactly behind the scenes why things have changed per se, but I think it. But today you get a lot more information, characters are fleshed out a lot more for you. Back then you maybe had like a small paragraph and now you can go in to do a session and they'll be like a couple pages of, you know, description about who this person is and their likes and their dislikes and their families and, and all these characters have been very fleshed out by the video game companies.
And they also have a lot of animation that you can look at, sometimes entire scenes that you do ADR or looping, or you're actually adding your voice to an already existing animation. That happens a lot more often where it seems like.
Back then, when Stay Tuned for Danger was recorded, it was a lot more common to record the voices and then they'll make some animation that fits whatever you recorded rather than vice versa.
In fact, it's kind of funny, I mean, not to pull another game into the conversation, but just as an example of what you're talking about (I think I have these numbers correct somebody will double check me and say no, you're off by a million).
But if I recall reading the day that Star Wars The Phantom Menace came out, it made $28 million in its first day. And, and the whole industry was just like, ohh, my gosh, 28 million in one day. It was like the biggest opening day of in history at the time.
And when the first Sonic Adventure came, came out with a Dreamcast that made $46 million in the first day and nobody mentioned it. Because it just wasn't part of the, it wasn't part of the the, the scope of what people were talking about at the time.
But now, you know, video games are such a multi gazillion dollar thing. They they're all part of the contracts. Whenever a movie starts to be filmed, you already have the video game plan probably halfway through animation before you even start, you know, shooting the movie. It's just a different world now,
MA: Ryan, if you don't know.I'm sure you, Tammy, know that Ryan was the voice of Sonic the Hedgehog and I was in the second the Sonic Adventure 2 as a very small role. And somebody sent me an e-mail on YouTube with a link to the video queued right to the part that my character was on and said, is this you? I'm a huge fan. It was fascinating to me because I hadn’t seen it since I’ve recorded it.
I've realized we're looking at YouTube and looking at other games for the same reason as as who in Stay Tuned for Danger that I can't get to the part where my characters speaks. And so I wanna see it. I can't get to it by playing it myself. So I'll watch it on YouTube and go, oh, that looks really neat. That's me and the pink dress. Isn't that funny?
RD: Isn't that funny that that's nothing we would have even considered that would be possible when we recorded it. If somebody would come to us and said, you know, 17 years from now, this entire game, somebody will play through the whole thing and they'll put it on the Internet where anyone can watch it. You'd be like what? Yeah, that's amazing.
MA: It's fascinating that there's this whole culture that that are so into it then, and I had no idea that would be a thing.
TT: It's the only way to be a real detective. Yeah. It's always fun to find out who the villain is. So were you both a little bit disappointed that it wasn't either of your characters and when you found that in the very end? Like who it was specifically? MA: I think to be honest, I was so excited to have my first voice over job that I just was happy to do it.
RD: Usually it's kind of like in as far as my character goes, usually the person that's painted really thickly up front to be kind of like the negative person or the pompous person. Or the person you wouldn't want to hang out with and you think that's not gonna be the murderer? That's just too easy. So yeah.
TT: Well looking at it now, the ending of the game kind of leaves up for interpretation of of both Rick and Mattie, you know, getting back together as a couple and their on-screen personas get married in the TV series. So Rick does stay with the show, which is good news, but what do you guys think Rick and Mattie would be up to now?
RD: I think that they were inspired by Nancy Drew and they opened a private investigating office and they became crime fighters and their old age together as a couple. They're like the Thin Man. But you know, in 2016,
MA: I love it. We, we, we, we haven't seen each other in many, many months. And that was what I was thinking as well. And you just took it out of my mouth. TT: Well, do you mind if we have a little conversation with Rick and Mattie? Would that be OK? I have a couple of questions for them.
RD: Ok, let's open that Pandora's box.
TT: So Rick, Yeah.You're a fabulous actor. Of course, everybody already knows that. Yeah, yeah.Where, where did you, where did you get the inspiration to be so great? You know, why? How, where does this greatness come from?
RD: Well, I'll tell you, Tammy. Oh, the, the greatness that comes within just comes straight from me. I mean, I could say that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, but really it's just standing on my own shoulders, which is difficult to do.
Just try and picture that in your head. I had heroes in my life, but I like to think that I'm a self-made man. So everything that you see, all this greatness that you see pouring out of me, it's a, it's all me. It's just all me natural. I can't even say my mother or father had anything to do with it. It's, it's just me. Thank you for asking.
TT: And, and why, why no Emmys? Why no Academy Awards? Don’t they see the greatness that is you don't they see the talent?
RD: You know what? People have been saying this lately, but you know, all those are worse things. They're all rigged. They're completely rigged now.
TT: What do you think of Dwayne Powers now? He was the one who was trying to kill you, of course, but you know, he's now behind bars or he actually broke free. I forgot about that.
RD: This new information for me, I didn't know that he was out. I gotta go. I gotta buy some barbed wire and some hand grenades.
TT: And Mattie, you know you. You have been together with Rick for so long and you kind of go along with his ego. Is there really a tender side to him, though?
MA: Well,
RD: Watch it. Watch it,
MA: Yes. There are things that we keep to ourselves behind closed doors and there are things that we present to the public, and I will just say that there is... A reason that I stay with Rick, and it's not for everyone to know.
TT: You also have an amazing style in in and taste in decorating your apartment. Where does that come from? Because it just looks so homely and just very relaxing to just sit in there by the fireplace and and look around and it's just a beautiful, bright home
MA: I did study a little bit. I studied a little bit in Japan and I really love the idea of Feng shui and how if you place things in your home in a certain way, it brings light.It's an energy to your surroundings. I just like to have a place where I can relax and where I can have friends.
TT: Now, if there was any role that you could play on TV now for both of you, what role would you love to kind of just steal away from another actor and play yourself?
MA: Oh, good one. I, I think I would enjoy playing the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. I love her optimism. I love her smile, it just lights up the screen. And I would love to dive into that.
RD: And Everybody knows that I'm hilarious. So I think I would like to be both Kete and Peele.
TT: Thank so much for talking with us today Rick and Mattie. I'm sure we'll hopefully see you guys sometime in the near future in a Nancy Drew game
RD: and thank you. From your mouth to the universe. Yes, thank you.
TT: That was so much fun! I keep hoping that Maddie and Rick will come back and and we'll see them in a in another Nancy Drew game in the near future. So if that opportunity ever arose, would you both be interested in reprising your roles?
MA: Absolutely.
RD: Always!
TT: You know, I cannot thank you both enough for coming on the show and I first before we end our interview. I would like to open up the floor since both of you have been working on several different projects since Stay Tuned for Danger, but what is the most recent projects that you have been working on that are listeners can go ahead and check out online or on TV?
RD: Oh my gosh, the most recent. Let me think.
MA: The most of the recent things that I've done have been live theater so there isn't really anything to check out as far as that goes, but I do have a website with a lot of videos from. I've done some solo cabaret shows and I used to sing at a soul night in New York so they could check out Moriah Angeline.net
RD: I have done it seems a lot of the voice, I've been doing lately have been for corporate videos and also for radio spots. So I don't know if they are online anywhere or whether where you can hear them.
TT: You have a pretty extensive IMDb page, don't you, Ryan?
RD: Somebody put that there. I didn't.
MA: Mine too.
RD: Yeah, but yeah, I mean, of course I IMD and just, you know, there's. There's a lot of material out there with people talking about, you know, the Sonic franchise and so forth, and.If you just wanna, you know, have fun with a few hours of your life just to just type that into YouTube and just watch people go.
TT: I love it. And to close our interview by last question, if you could describe your experience working for Her Interactive and on this Nancy Drew game, what is the one word you would use to describe that entire experience?
MA: I think I would just have to say fun. I remember it being really a lovely day it was. It was fun and the people were very easy to work with, especially because I was nervous at being my first voiceover job and I didn't want to do it incorrectly. And I remember feeling at ease very quickly and having just a wonderful time. RD: And Moriah stole my word. I was going to say lovely. Just a lovely experience. Good people and a good company. I'm so glad that they're still alive and kicking after all this time.
