Do or do not — there is no try when you’re an actor leading a game like Star Wars Outlaws.
First, it’s Star Wars, a franchise whose most ardent fans fight daily battles over the legacy of the series, often at the expense of the talent involved. The actual work — the motion-capture, the voice work, the weaving of performance with play — is isolating, and an actor can only hope to deliver enough soul to the digital artists who will render a playable character in full. And then the hype of the “first-ever open-world Star Wars game” raises the stakes.
None of this made Humberly González flinch when she snagged the role of Kay Vess in Ubisoft’s AAA tentpole.
“I didn’t put pressure on myself that it was Star Wars. It didn’t make me feel scared,” González tells Polygon, dialing in on a September morning from the North Carolina set of her new Netflix series, The Waterfront. “I felt like this is the kind of project that would bring potentially different conversations that could be polarizing, but at the end of the day, there’s not a lot of opportunities for Latinas to lead a Star Wars project. I felt very proud.”
The 32-year-old Venezuelan actor has spent the last decade performing in screen projects big and small, from Netflix’s Jupiter’s Legacy and Ginny & Georgia to leading Friends & Family Christmas, Hallmark’s first lesbian holiday romance, and playing the target of a murderous supernatural entity in last summer’s Tarot. But Star Wars Outlaws was the job, González says, the “big opportunity for me to showcase what I can do after the last nine years of my career.”
If anything, “Star Wars was the cherry on top” of a bigger dream: to be the lead of a video game.
Image: Massive Entertainment/Ubisoft
When she landed the role of on-the-run rogue Kay Vess, González already had a number of Ubisoft games in her holster, including roles in Starlink: Battle for Atlas, Far Cry 6, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. González’s mocap experience goes back even further than professional jobs — she was an actual student of the game-performance craft.
During her third year at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, González participated in a workshop with Ubisoft in which students were given the chance to perform in a motion-capture volume and perform in the camera rigs. “We would wear the suits and do mock themes from other games like Splinter Cell and stuff like that,” she says. “When I found out that this was a part of the job, I was like, I love this. I’m a very physical person. I love theater. I love how creative it was that I didn’t have to rely on anything else but my imagination. And I’ve always been that kind of actor that I don’t need much to dive into believing that something is happening in front of me.”
For all of its stealth quests, sabacc tournaments, and decadent eating minigames, Star Wars Outlaws hinges on González’s performance as Kay Vess to make it more of a character-driven adventure than typical open-world experience. And while early missions fulfill the promise of “Han Solo simulator,” González wanted to stray from mimicking Harrison Ford’s rogue precedent. Unlike Han in the original trilogy, Kay is alone, resorting to crime, and sent rocketing out of her home on Canto Bight after a heist gone wrong. González saw potential in veering from the archetype: She wanted to play that classic scoundrel, but as a rookie. She wanted to be ferocious, but defensive. Kay’s a risk taker, but a vulnerable one.
While the play of Outlaws would require the hero to level up and acquire skills, in González’s mind, that evolution was part of a survivor’s journey, complete with a reconciliation of the past. As bounty hunters pursue Kay through the galaxy, so do the memories (and current exploits) of a mother who trained her in the art of thievery.
“She just has this ability to adapt and make mistakes, but not make it her demise,” González says. “It’s relatable in a sense that she could just be any regular person. It could be really you or me or anyone who plays the game — she doesn’t have the Force. She’s not skilled in the way that she could take on the biggest and baddest in the galaxy, but her resilience and fearlessness takes her there, and she’s not afraid to continue even if she fails.”
Image: Massive Entertainment/Ubisoft
None of this was clear when González auditioned for Star Wars Outlaws because, over five months of scenework and chemistry reads conducted over Zoom, she never knew she was auditioning for a Star Wars game. “I thought I was auditioning for Westworld!” González says about the pages of generic space cowboy material she tore through during the rigorous vetting process. And only when she read with Jay Rincon, the actor inhabiting Kay’s droid cohort ND-5, did she learn the marathon was for Outlaws, and Ubisoft wanted her for Kay.
González thinks her “it” factor was simply her “natural self.” When Ubisoft finally revealed Kay to her, she felt perfectly aligned from the beginning. “It’s hard for an actor not to get attached to a part until you book it,” she says, “but I really felt like this was me and this was meant for me.”
Star Wars takes place in a galaxy far, far away, but González instantly connected to Kay as a Venezuelan who left her own country at a young age. “Kay having these abandonment issues and being on her own and being kind of excluded from the rest of the world, feeling like things are rigged against her… I think of the political turmoil in my country, I think of the estrangement I feel from my family and the fact that I always wanted more for myself. How do you attain that when you grew up with nothing, you’re truly making ends meet? My family grew up in extreme poverty, and we were the first ones to ever emigrate and leave. It was a very scary unknown world out there, where I didn’t even know English when I left. So there was a lot of risk. There was a lot of facing your fears, resilience that comes from upbringing, fending for yourself in a place where you really only had yourself.”
The Latin experience gave González a footing in the Star Wars universe, and her life as an out and proud queer woman shaded it. While the game may not be a love story, González thinks her own performance and the work by writer Nikki Foy imbue Kay with an implicit queer identity. As she puts it, “If you are feeling it, it’s accurate.
“I think everyone is definitely picking up on the fact that she meets Selo [the speeder mechanic] and she’s all structured and nervous and that energy affects her,” González says. “Even with Vail [the bounty hunter] — there’s an energy there too. It doesn’t need to be obvious, but if you’re picking up on it, isn’t that just human behavior? It’s relationships, it’s energy.”
The other make-or-break quality that González and Kay share might be that they’d go nowhere without their favorite furry companions. The actor never saw Nix, the mischievous merqaal who aids Kay in pickpocketing stormtroopers, as a pet, but a true accomplice. The Ubisoft team deepened that connection for González by rendering Nix as an actual puppet, as opposed to the original plan of a blue stuffy on a stick. Brought to life on the mocap stage by puppeteer Camille Loiselle-D’Aragon, Nix had eyes, hair, and all the character he has in the game, which fully activated González’s imagination as a fervent dog lover.
When González left Venezuela — “starting over, betting on myself to be an actor, not having my family in the country, not having anyone else but truly myself” — she eventually found security in her bichon frise shih tzu, Oreo. He is absolutely, González says, the Nix to her Kay. “It’s just literally me and my dog everywhere I go,” she says. “I’ve had him for 14 years, so that relationship connects.”
An actor has never won an Oscar or Emmy for playing a character in a Star Wars saga, but few have had 17-plus hours — and a reported 11,376 lines — to carve out their characters among the lightsaber duels and blaster fire. (And that’s not counting the future DLCs, which González is still working on, out of studios in North Carolina.) This year’s Game Awards could rectify the lack of acting prestige for the franchise, if González follows Jedi: Survivor’s Cameron Monaghan into the performance category and actually nabs a win. There’s honor there, for an actor who doesn’t see gaming as a stepping stone to great work as much as a lane in which great work can be done. Even with the sheer volume of animation required to bring Kay to life, González knows the intense level of effort required to actually show up and put up in a game — and she says it’s changed her live-action acting for the better.
“All I have to focus on is my own performance,” she says. “At the end of the day, they are looking for all of that nuance. We did so many facial scans. There’s even a process [that lasts] for hours that was me simply reading a sentence or being told an emotion on how to read the sentence. And we did it in every emotion possible just so that we could calculate all of the micro movements in Kay’s face. And that was such a vigorous process that we spent hours crafting all of the possible movements so that the animators have options. But my focus is telling the story and making sure that I am as convincing as any other story I’ve ever told in my career.”