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Profile for Rica Matsumoto (Voice Actress)
As the voice of Satoshi and performer of various theme songs for the Pokemon anime in Japan, Rica Matsumoto has contributed a lot to the series as both a voice actress and singer. She also is a radio personality and variety show commentator, with a natural cheerfulness and casual conversation style. Her father is also the head of a public theatre group, so she’s been heavily involved in theatre as a stage actress since she was young.
The survival action game “Friday the 13th the Game” will be released in Japan from Natsume Atari on 08/02/2018. The dubbing for the long awaited Japanese version has had a lot of effort put into it, as it features popular voice actress Rica Matsumoto voicing Pamela (Jason’s mother) and Tommy Jarvis. We spoke to Rica Matsumoto herself about her feelings about these roles, as well as the process of recording for them.
First off, please tell us about your feelings when you received the offer for these roles.
(Matsumoto) I don’t handle movies about the occult or scary things in general very well. When I went to see The Exorcist when I was young, I remember crying from fear and having to leave halfway through. And then that night I had a nightmare that my bed started shaking and I was running away and trying to escape…(Laughs) So I make an effort to not watch many scary movies.
By the way, did you know about this game beforehand?
(Matsumoto) I’ve known about it for awhile, but I don’t play it because it’s scary. They told me “We’ll give you a copy once it’s done”, and I do kind of feel like I should at least see the thing that I was involved in…well I think I’d be fine if I played it with the rest of the staff. My TV at home is a 60 inch, and it would probably be pretty scary on a screen that big…so I think I should probably try it out while it’s light outside (Laughs).
But you do dubs for western horror movies, right?
(Matsumoto) In those cases I read read the script and spend the afternoon rehearsing. I think there may have been some incidents of neighbors thinking “What’s going on!?” when they’ve heard me screaming “Kyaa!” at night (Laughs). But this role involved speaking relatively normally, and playing a mother. But I got scared when I felt empathy as I was reading this script. It kind of felt like coming back into your own body after being possessed by a spirit, or something.
What kind of an image did you have for your role?
(Matsumoto) Pamela is a mother, but the way she thinks is a bit one-sided. She’s a character that you could really question with “I wonder about that…” From someone else’s perspective they’d think she was mistaken, and may say all sorts of different things about it. But it makes some amount of sense to a mother. So I took great care to emphasize her dialogue in a certain way when voicing her. I spoke in a very pointed way, so I hope that the terror came through in it.
There are many aspects to Pamela’s character, such as insanity and obsession. Which aspect did you feel most strongly?
(Matsumoto) Love, I think. I guess you could call it love for her son…That’s all I could think about while I was voicing the role.
Where there are any aspects of it that were particularly difficult?
(Matsumoto) We all exchanged opinions over small amounts of ad-libing and inflections throughout the process, and I think in the end it came out pretty great. There were parts I did that were very much based on having listened to the original voice for her, and got a lot of praise from the director for it. So it may be that I was just good at pulling people into what I was doing (Laughs)
So then it was a performance that you were very satisfied with. If there are any specific points that you’d like people to pay attention to, please let us know what they are.
(Matsumoto) I think that the voice of Jason’s mother in his head being an exchange between a mother and a little boy really brings out the terror. I really voiced that role in such a way as to leave the image of being able to hear it in the refrain, even with your eyes closed, after you’re done playing the game.
That…does seem very terrifying. Lastly, please give us a message to the fans.
(Matsumoto) This is a very well made and interesting game regardless of my involvement, so please enjoy it. I think you’ll all be very pleased with it!