Bayonetta 3 is set to launch on October 28 but will do so without the talents of Hellena Taylor, the voice actress who has played the titular character from the beginning. Bayonetta 3 Game Director Yusuke Miyata confirmed that Taylor would not be reprising her character earlier this month. It was announced that Jennifer Hale, best known for playing Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect trilogy and Ashe in Overwatch. Miyata stated that “overlapping circumstances” prevented Taylor from reprising her role in the sequel. However, over the weekend, Hellena Taylor released series of videos explaining why she declined the offer to return to voice Bayonetta again, revealing that a final offer of $4,000 was the main factor in her decision.
“This is an insult to me, the amount of time that I took to work on my talent and everything that I have given to this game and the fans,” Taylor said. “I’m asking the fans to boycott this game and instead spend the money you would spend on this game, donating it to charity. I didn’t want the world, I didn’t ask for too much. I was just asking for a decent, dignified living wage. What they did was legal, but it was immoral.”
“They now have a new girl voicing [Bayonetta] and I love actors, I wish her all the joy in the world, I wish her all the jobs, but she has no right to say she’s the voice of Bayonetta – I created that voice. She has no right to sign merchandise as Bayonetta,” said Taylor.
Taylor also talked about how declining the offer affected her mental health and propelled suicidal ideation. She released the video to stand up for those around the world who “do not get paid properly for their talents. Bayonetta always stands up for those with less power and stands up for what is right and in doing this, you stand with her,” she said. Kamiya responded to Taylor’s allegations, saying
Following the release of this tweet and his account getting briefly restricted, deleting, and then reactivating his account, Kamiya has made no other direct comment on the situation. Developer PlatinumGames and publisher Nintendo have yet to respond.
Video game voice actors have spoken out on Twitter over the weekend about notoriously low pay. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) has previously addressed the situation. Under current SAG-AFTRA terms, video game voice actors must be paid $956.75 per four-hour days. For a single voice, the hourly rate is $478.50. $319.00 is added for additional voices. Bonus payments are tacked on for the number of sessions it takes to record the game.
During a Nintendo podcast in 2018, Helena said that she recorded her lines for both Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 over four days, each session lasting four hours which would line up to the $4,000 minium pay rate. It is unclear how long Bayonetta 3 is or how many voice lines there were to record. Hellena Taylor would be reprising an iconic role in a franchise that’s sold million of games over the years.
“The exploitation of [voice actors] is not new,” voice director Eliana Zebro told Polygon. “So many indie projects especially has low, low VA rates — mere dollars per final line delivered, or worse, a flat rate for an entire project that means well under a dollar per line. It happens to all [voice actors], big and small.”
Today, Jennifer Hale released a statement about Bayonetta 3 and the situation regarding Hellena Taylor.