Hellena Taylor – once the voice of the voluptuous Bayonetta – has some rectifying to do. The British voice actress made headlines earlier by slamming PlatinumGames with a devastating claim of cheapassery, but the claim has now been altered by Taylor herself. Coming back to the “preposterous” $4000 flat rate mentioned before, Hellena now recalls a different offer.
Before I kick this off: Hellena, if you’re reading this, what on earth got into you? I’m not going to say that you’ve had it all and lost it now, but damn, woman. Do you even realize the shit you’ve gotten yourself into? We were all kind of sympathetic to your cause, but you have basically squandered a lot of goodwill.
In case you’ve missed it, Hellena stirred up quite the hornet’s nest by explaining why she hasn’t voiced Bayonetta in Bayonetta 3. According to the actress, developer PlatinumGames made her a lowball offer of $4000 for all of Bayonetta’s voice lines. As you might expect, that didn’t go down well and the offer was declined, giving Jennifer Hale the opportunity to take over Hellena’s job.
But then, others stepped in, siding with PlatinumGames. The alleged $4000 deal was reportedly inaccurate. According to several sources, $4000 was indeed offered… per session, of which there were supposedly four or five in total. Those same sources also claimed that Hellena was seeking a six-figure payment and residuals. Hellena has now reached out on Twitter once more to lay those claims to rest. Unfortunately for her, she also came back to her previous statements and altered them ever so slightly.
As you can see above, the $4000 all-in rate was once a $10,000 offer which became $15,000 after negotiations. As far as I can tell, the final $4000 offer was eventually made for a few voice lines, not the full game. So even if there’s truth to her first claim, it does come off as misleading.
Oh Hellena, what a mess you’ve made. You could’ve avoided this shitstorm by just saying that “a financial stalemate between you PlatinumGames” was the reason for your absence. By going into detail and telling two different versions of it, you’ve effectively made yourself very unpopular in the voice-acting scene. And that, miss Taylor, is very bad for business. Especially if you’re desperately looking for it.
And honestly, you can’t really blame PlatinumGames for making you those offers. You have acknowledged taking $3,400 for Bayonetta 1 and “a little more” for Bayonetta 2. And you are still surprised by a $10,000 proposition, which even got upped to fifteen grand? Go figure…
