An Interview with Alex Jordan

The Alters, the survival management game that released this month, blew me away for many, many reasons. One of those reasons was the fact that the voice actor Alex Jordan (Cyberpunk 77, Dragon Age) not only voiced the main protagonist, Jan Dolski, but also all eleven of the Alters in the game. That’s twelve characters! 

This piqued my curiosity, so I got in touch with Alex to see if he would be up for an interview to find out more about the process of voicing so many characters, and he was very kind in agreeing.

In the interview, Alex talks about his approach to creating the different voices, how he overcame any hurdles that he came up against, some insight on the recording of Jan’s song and much more!

To get started, I was keen to learn a little about how Alex found himself acting and how he ended up in the voice acting world.  

I discovered pretty early on in my childhood that I had a knack for impersonating people and coming up with characters. My parents really encouraged me to get into acting. Fortunately for me, I happened to live next to one of the UK’s best theatres, Chichester Festival Theatre, which had an amazing youth theatre. 

I continued to work on my impressions and in 2006, I began uploading them to YouTube at the age of 16. A couple of years later, one of the UK’s top voice agents would find me on YouTube and decide to sign me. They continued to represent me while I was at drama school, even though I was too busy to really work.

When I graduated, I began doing voice jobs more and more until eventually voice acting became my full-time job.

Moving on to The Alters and for what is a massive job for anyone to take on, it could risk either leaving someone feeling apprehensive about the task at hand or just be pumped and ready to go and I asked Alex which camp he landed in.

The moment I received the news I had landed the role was nothing but jubilation. I went up onto the roof of the flats/apartments I lived in at the time and popped a bottle of bubbles. 

It was the next day that a weird sense of dread suddenly came over me. Now I actually had to do the job and do it well enough to justify why I was given this opportunity. Why me over someone else? Would they have done a better job than me? The dread quickly faded though when we got in the booth and began the work. 

One of the fascinations I held about the voice acting was Alex’s approach to how the Alter’s voices would sound. I was also especially interested to learn whether he included any type of mannerism to produce that sound. 

It was a very collaborative process to come up with the Alters’ personality. What was interesting was that we always had a core personality to build out from. The analogy I use a lot is of a tree. Jan is the trunk of the tree; we begin there, and all of the Alters have to branch off from there. They have to stand independent but not totally removed. If they are too different from the trunk and the other branches, then the tree starts to look weird and not make sense as a whole.

Each Alter has a very specific physical position, though. I will change the way I stand, the way my jaw sits, and how my tongue rests in my mouth.

With so many voices to find, it must have been a struggle to come up with the amount of variation needed, and I asked Alex if he took any inspiration from other games or media for the voices. 

I think I made the decision pretty early on to avoid taking inspiration from elsewhere. This felt like such a unique and new challenge that I owed it to everyone involved, myself included, to have this be my own journey and discovery. I didn’t want to feel like I was trying to walk in someone else’s footsteps when the road I was walking seemed so untrodden. I might as well be looking ahead and enjoying the view, rather than constantly looking at my feet and where they’re stepping.

Finding these voices must have also created some problems along the way, to the point that there must have been one Alter that was a particular struggle to find a voice for. 

I think any of the more regional dialects were more challenging. I’m British and very aware that there will be people who are more than happy and ready to pick holes in flaws.

I think from a less consciously technical point of view, the botanist was a challenge. The place his voice sits in is a very open part of my throat. It’s the openness you experience right before you yawn. It can be a challenge to find where that voice goes when it’s aggressive or angry.

One area that was burning a hole in my intrigue was if Alex had a favourite Alter to voice, with me hoping that it would be the scientist. 

The Alter I’m most attached to is the Technician… But I think my favourite might be the Guard (sorry!).

With the quantity of voices to record, it must have been a minefield in planning and recording the lines and specifically whether Alex recorded one voice at a time or whether he mixed and matched.

We would work through a scene from the perspective of the Alter and then head back to the beginning of the scene to respond as Jan. It really varied how many scenes we could do in a row. I could do one scene as the scientist, three as the miner, two as the technician, one as the botanist, three as the guard, and one as the shrink. So there was a fair amount of moving around.

With this amount of switching between characters, I wondered if Alex found this quite natural or if it caused any issues in the recording sessions.

I now find it very easy to switch between their voices. It happens naturally. However, towards the end of recording, we would get to the ‘pick-ups section’. This is when we finish the work on the game, everything is recorded, and then we go back through to fine-tune things that aren’t working. It could be line changes, the realisation that an angry line could go straight into a branching dialogue option where they’re less angry and it’s in these moments I needed to work out the balance. 

But when we’re recording these pickups, we would often do a couple of lines as each Alter and then switch. That jumping around became a real challenge, as I wanted to ensure the utmost integrity to do justice to the rest of the recording process. It was also very mentally draining to do that for 4 hours at a time.

Nothing ever goes smoothly, as there’s always a point when things don’t quite go the way you planned and I asked Alex if this had been the case when he was performing his lines. 

It’s hard to say. The whole thing was a challenge. A challenge that I loved, though. I feel very lucky to have been put through my paces in this way.

One area I always wonder about is how much freedom an actor has had with their character(s) and I checked with Alex if he was given the opportunity to put much input into Jan or the Alters or whether he had to stick with what was already laid out. 

The process was a partnership with 11 Bit, the performance director (Damien Goodwin) and myself from day one. We all worked as one unit to shape these characters and it was a genuinely harmonious experience. We all saw the same vision and knew how to work together to arrive at it.

If there was one standout moment in the game, it had to be Jan’s song. My head was spinning with all the alternate ways in which it must have been performed and the procedure around it. 

The song was a challenge, for sure. When you’re finding a voice for a character, the most common supplementary sounds you normally have to work out are the stutters, the hesitations, and the umms and ahhs. Occasionally you’ll need to figure out what they sound like when they laugh; rarer is finding out what they sound like when they cry. Even rarer is how they sing.

Not only did I have to figure out how these characters would all sing and perform believably and stay consistent, but I also had to work out what their relationship would be with singing. One Alter might love it but be bad at it. Another might be alright at it but find it embarrassing. It’s a next level of complexity that I had not yet experienced.

With the complexities surrounding this section alone, it must have taken some time to record just these singing parts. 

I think we managed to get it all in a 3-4 hour window!

I was taken by surprise at how quickly that took, but still Alex must have been fed up with the song by the end of the recording. 

You know what, I actually listen to it kind of frequently. Not in an egotistical way. It doesn’t feel like my voice when I hear it! It feels like I’m listening to a load of friends singing, and that brings me a huge comfort.

Moving on to the game itself, another area I am always curious about is when a voice actor finally plays the final product and whether anything in particular makes more sense to them than it did in the recording sessions and I checked in to see if Alex had had that experience yet. 

You know, I have yet to play the full game! I have been extremely busy with a few different things lately, and I want to play the game in full for the first time on my Twitch channel. I don’t want to begin the playthrough only to keep postponing streams because I’m flying all over the place.

It deserves the respect of my full time and attention, especially as the developers at 11 Bit deserve for me to give it my full attention. Tomek, the game director, also deserves for me to give it my full attention. I owe it to myself and all the work I put in as well.

Voice acting for a game like The Alters is a rare thing, but I asked Alex if the opportunity were to come up again for a similar project, would he say yes? 

I’ve done a lot of characters in games before. There was one game where I played 18 roles, but never like this and as complex as this. But I would do it in a heartbeat. I have loved every second and working with Damien Goodwin was one of the most pleasing experiences of my career. The writing from Kasia and Manda was sensational; they crafted something incredibly special. Tomek is a game director whose name deserves to be up in lights, as he has made something so special and singularly unique. It would be a hard challenge to beat.

I appreciate Alex is tied under many contracts but I gave him some space in case he could let us know of any future projects he’s involved in that we should be getting excited about. 

Oooooh, I wish!!!

I am working on 9 games right now. Some AAA and some indie. I will say this: there’s one particular role I’m working on that is going to make A LOT of actors very jealous. It’s an insane privilege to be taking on the challenge of that role. When the day comes that I can say what it is, you’ll know…

Many thanks to Alex for his time and honesty in answering our questions. I hope this has thrown some light on voice acting and hopefully raised your interest in not only playing The Alters but also appreciating the contributions and hard work voice actors give to the games they work on. 

If you would like to keep up to date with Alex and those intriguing upcoming projects, then you can follow him on BlueSky and X

Also, please check out our review of The Alters, and if you have already played the game, then tell us on BlueSky what your experiences were; we would love to hear them.