During San Diego Comic-Con, I had the chance to sit down with some of the cast and creators of the new DC animated movie, Justice League: Gods & Monsters. In this roundtable interview, we sat down with Tamara Taylor (Bones) who does the voice for Wonder Woman in the movie but this is not the traditional Wonder Woman we all know. Read on to find out why…
Q: What are some of the challenges that came with voice acting?
Tamara Taylor: Uh…everything! [Laughs] It was such a different medium. You get a lot more time in television to go over something. Thank goodness with Andrea Romano, who literally walked me through every single line because when we first recorded I didn’t see anything, so I was just sort of in a booth doing it in an abstract. That was really challenging.
Q: Do you think that this will sort of lead us into a sequel?
Taylor: I hope it does ’cause I think this take on these particular characters was really cool. I think that there’s so many places that they can go with it.
Q: Can you discuss the relationship between Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor?
Taylor: Yeah, well…we know that they have a history and she kinda gives it to him but they don’t go into it too deeply though.
Q: Wonder Woman is obviously very powerful physically, how did you relate that with voicing her?
Taylor: It’s amazing because most of the performance in animation is the voice and you know, I have a pretty deep and powerful voice but I found myself having to adjust many things because she actually required more power than Cam on ‘Bones,’ it was pretty intense.
Q: How much research and backstory of Wonder Woman did you look into?
Taylor: I didn’t have a whole lot of time before we recorded to look into it but of course, I grew up watching the TV series and of course, I like comic books and I read the basics. Oddly, there wasn’t a whole lot of help because this is a completely different Wonder Woman. There’s very little that they kept the same so I had to kind of throw everything out the window and dive in.
Q: When you’re voicing Wonder Woman, how do you prepare yourself for the action scenes?
Taylor: That was the hardest part and again, that was Andrea Romano. There was a lot of physicality and it was in moments, totally uncomfortable and why out of my depth but I had a blast.
Q: You were obviously chosen for your voice, when going into this, were you just trying to speak for the character as you or input a different type of person for Wonder Woman?
Taylor: I went into this with preconceived notions and I knew what Wonder Woman sounded like and I thought I was supposed to sound like Wonder Woman, and Andrea and Bruce [Timm] kept on saying ‘No. Let that go. We need a little more moxie. Kinda sex her up a little bit.’ There were some interesting direction going on.
Chris Salce: So you would say that this Wonder Woman is a totally different type of Wonder Woman than we have ever seen?
Taylor: I’ll leave it up to you guys but she’s certainly different than I’ve ever seen and again, I really wanted to go with what I knew and even having just seen the film, it took me a minute to get used to seeing that voice come out of her. It’s interesting, it’s cool.
Chris Salce: How long did the voiceover process take from beginning to completion?
Taylor: Longer than I ever could have imagined. I think I did the initial scratch vocals in January of two thousand and fourteen and I thought ‘Oh in June they will call me back,’ I was all excited, then June came and went and I was like ‘um…what’s happening? Did they replace me?’ I guess it’s just the process, which I’m so not familiar with. Finally I got a call at the beginning of this year saying it’s time to to come back in.
Justice League: Gods & Monsters will be on Digital HD on July 14, and as a Blu-ray Combo Pack/DVD on July 28.
