Maybe there’s more to this…

Debra Wilson’s likeness is in a long list of games, and in a recent interview she said something worth hearing. The decision to use her face is not hers. She says the companies and the designers are the ones insisting on it, and that she actually prefers roles where the character looks nothing like her, because that is what lets you escape into a character.

I am not posting this to defend any particular design. I am posting it because of what it says about how these industries actually work.

Her examples: Cere Junda in Star Wars Jedi, Grace Walker in Wolfenstein II, Amanda Waller in Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, and Callisto in Marvel’s Wolverine.

Here is what I think a lot of people get wrong. There is an assumption that the person whose face is on screen is the person who decided it should be there. Very often they are not. They are a contractor. Somebody above them greenlit it, somebody else approved it, and a chain of people signed off before any of it ever reached you.

I have had to learn this from the other side. Running a comic company and working with a distributor the size of Hachette Book Group taught me how many hands touch a thing before it is finished, and how little of that is visible from the outside.

To be fair to customers, it is not your job to run an investigation before you are allowed to dislike something. You are being sold a product and you get to say what you think of it. That is not who I am talking about. I am talking about the folks who take aim at an individual who had little to nothing to do with the decision.

And it does go the other way. There are cases where the talent or their agent is the one pushing for face time, because being recognizable is brand leverage. That is part of why you sometimes see masked characters unmasked more than the story needs. I have been in those conversations. It happens in both directions.

I do not know what her contract says or whether she could have declined, so I am not going to pretend that I do. The point is that there are more layers here than most of us assume.

I have been humbled on this stuff enough times to be a lot more considerate about where I aim.

Tell me what you think.

https://rippaverse.com/