BLIZZARD: Hi, James! I read in your biography that you lived in Hong Kong – what was that like?

JAMES: I was there in Kowloon, educated during grade school from the age of 5 to 9. Everything you do in life adds to your art, and that gave me the sense of adjusting to a whole new world, of the Hong Kong atmosphere, which, as you can imagine, is great. Getting a piece of toast from an old man who used to be hunched over on a street corner near where I stayed – he would make toast for some reason, and you could buy it for a penny. Little images have added to the roles that I play – you have, in your games, a lot of those dark images that are in my memory.

Education in the Chinese grade school was great – not the most pleasant thing, but certainly it becomes your background, it enriches who you are. I think everybody should open themselves to travel and experience. Don’t you?

BLIZZARD: Yeah, absolutely. Do you still go back pretty often?

JAMES: Yes, I’ve been back there. When China was just opening up, “taking off their uniforms,” so to say, I was there for months, making “Marco Polo.” This is when China was still China, and not full of hotels. Most of what I saw in Beijing – not most, but half of it is just razed and modernized now. American fast food is all over the place. It’s kind of sad to see all of that go, but, again, that’s become part of my background.

BLIZZARD: Can you tell us a bit about how you got your start with acting in general?

JAMES: The start of my career was in 1953. I got on a quiz show with Groucho Marx. I did some impersonations, including Groucho, Peter Lorrie, Jimmy Stewart. That got out to the United States audience, and I got a huge reaction – they said the 2nd biggest fan-mail Groucho ever got on that program. That started the ball rolling. I got an agent, and my first role was in Soldier of Fortune with Clark Gable.

BLIZZARD: You’ve had an amazingly broad career since then. You’ve done a lot of film and animation; I know you personally from Mulan, Kung Fu Panda, Big Trouble [in Little China], and you’ve started doing video games.

JAMES: I’d like to see if one of these days if I could put my name in the almanac as the actor with the most character roles. I think I hold that record, though I’m not sure.

BLIZZARD: If you don’t hold that record, you’re definitely in the running. Yeah, you should see about that.

So, I was curious – with all the film and animation work in your background, do you do anything different to prepare for working on a video game?

JAMES: A little bit. Video games are a separate entity – the biggest entertainment industry of late. So you do have to approach it differently, certainly differently from an on-camera job. On camera, you have to fuss around with wardrobe, makeup, get into character – I think of all the work I did for “Big Trouble in Little China,” for Lo Pan, with different makeup, months studying the role. Now, with video games, you don’t have all that trouble getting into a role physically, but it’s a different approach – you read the script, study the character, and find out what the purpose of the character is, his history and mission, what he’s trying to accomplish, and then you go in and do the voice, and from that point the voice director takes over. You can go in in your pajamas and do the lines, and it’s okay.

BLIZZARD: Tell us about your time in the studio recording for Covetous Shen on Diablo III.

JAMES: We went down to the LA studio – it was always the same studio, I remember it well. Andrea Toyias was always behind the booth giving me direction, and she’s a great voice director. I remember that I had to do a LOT of takes. The director was very meticulous – it was one try after another until we nailed it down, because I didn’t exactly have a picture of what was happening in the game. I had a vague idea, but have to I rely on the director to guide me through the scene with clues.

I remember goofing around and doing voices from Big Trouble to make everybody laugh, and then moving right back into the game voice. One has to have some fun with it, obviously. I think you see that; hopefully the player gets to see the sense of humor we put into Covetous Shen.

BLIZZARD: I think they absolutely have. You’ve got what’s probably the quirkiest voice in the game – it’s super idiosyncratic, and I don’t think anyone else sounds like you. When you did the voice for Shen, did you do any ad-libbing, or was that entirely pre-planned?

JAMES: I tried to do some ad-libs. I kind of snuck it up on them – I’d do a few lines that Andrea thought would be good for the game, and then throw in a few ad-libs, whether it’s a laugh or a quirky comment that I think Covetous might do, because he’s a sneaky little character, you know? He kind of gets under your skin one way or another. By the time I’ve done a voice three or four times, I know what I want the player to feel, and that’s the whole gist of the game. That’s the craft with games – just through your voice, to draw the player into a situation that he possibly has not thought about, and lead him in a direction to solve problems.

BLIZZARD: Your character in Diablo III is very wise, but, as you pointed out, he’s also a bit silly, kind of a trickster-style character. How do you balance those two qualities? They seem almost like they’d be a little opposed.

JAMES: In a way, it’s tough; in a way it’s not. I’m that kind of person – I love to poke fun and stimulate other people to action. I hate the status quo. With food, like Covetous, I like to taste different things. When I sit down to a dinner, I try to get other people to order something that I like too, so I can eat off of their plate. When I eat Chinese food, I order more dishes than I can possibly eat so that I can try each one of them. In that sense, Covetous is not too different from the real James Hong – we’re just out to grab some fun out of life.

BLIZZARD: Do you remember how long your recording sessions were? Were they 4-hour long marathon sessions, or shorter sessions?

JAMES: They averaged between 1 and 2 hours – sometimes a little longer, sometimes shorter. I like variety, and I can only be really good in a period of 2 hours. After that, I start fading. I worked with Frank Sinatra on a film called Never So Few. I’ll always remember that, because we’d rehearse a little bit – Frank didn’t like to rehearse too much – and then when the camera was ready, Frank shouted, [imitating Sinatra perfectly] “All right, you got one take, and that’s it!” Everybody’s trembling and shaking because they’ve gotta get things perfect in one take. That’s what Frank did – he was a great one-taker.

BLIZZARD: Knowing that as a series, Diablo can be a bit on the dark side – hacking up zombies, violence, etc. – how do you keep it fun or light? How do you have a good time with it?

JAMES: It’s a very important question – throughout my career, I’ve done some ‘heavy’ roles, serious roles in Chinatown and so forth. It’s very important that you get into doing a voice, making a game work for yourself and for players, but once you’re through acting – or through playing – you’ve really gotta divorce yourself from [it], and find your own self again. I find myself, when I’ve done a role, naturally repeating lines over in my head as I’m driving home – and I’ve got to get out of that, get back to reality and my real relationship with people and what I’m doing. Do something else – play baseball, go dancing – and get back into your real life. I don’t know how else to put it, but it’s very important to keep a yin and yang balance.

BLIZZARD: What was the most fun part of portraying Covetous Shen?

JAMES: He’s a jeweler. He makes jewelry. He takes bits of gems and makes a better whole out of them, and crafts for the player. Though he would like to find a particular gem for himself – he is very greedy and very selfish in a sense – in the meantime, he does a great service, helping the player add gems to weapons or equipment. It gave me a thrill to know that I’m actually helping the player. Hopefully that comes through in my role.

BLIZZARD: Do you think there's more to Covetous? That maybe he’s a deity? Do you think he’s just messing with the player?

JAMES: I like to think that he’s a deity of some kind. To me, he’s probably an outcast among the deities, who was thrown onto [Sanctuary] because he was naughty. Now, he’s just doing his deeds. He’s a scrounger. He looks for little pieces of jewelry, and tries to make something out of everything that he finds. He looks like a bag man, and he’s very sarcastic, but his knowledge is great. So there’s something behind that knowledge – how he got it, and how he became a maker of jewels is a big mystery.

BLIZZARD: One thing that I hear quite a lot from players of Blizzard games is a general interest in the craft of voice acting, so I wanted to ask you about that. Do you think that it’s possible for anybody who’s determined and hardworking enough to get into acting or animation for games, or do you think that you need to have a certain talent, that your voice has to sound a certain way or you have to meet a particular niche, a voice that people identify with a certain build or nationality?

JAMES: I think it’s both. How I more or less got into this is that I used to talk to myself a lot, as a lonely child, mimicking this and that, and that became sort of the training grounds for being a voice actor. I never thought of it as that, but it became very valuable. Changing their voice is something most young people do, whether in their childhood or later in life. You simply take that innate talent and train it. There are voiceover teachers here in Hollywood, because doing voice work is a different craft than just acting on stage. When you do a voiceover, you’re sitting in that chair alone with a microphone – that’s your whole surrounding. You have nothing else but your innate talent and imagination to rely on. You have to know how to apply your training, your surroundings, your spirit, your soul, and what your imagination can create. Some people that I’ve heard do voices, I sit there and I’m amazed, totally amazed by what they can do. There are so many good actors around. There’s no easy way to do it – it’s a crowded field – but once you get into it, and directors and producers come to rely on you, you’re gonna get a lot of work, whether it’s doing characters or just doing announcing.

BLIZZARD: Are you into jewelry at all, or was that just acting?

JAMES: Into actual jewelry, no, into crafting, yes. As a young child, I loved woodwork, metalwork, making go-carts. I still love to create things and draw. As far as helping the player as Covetous Shen . . . I do wish I’d get a tip from time to time. At the least, I hope the players can give me a ‘thank you.’ Maybe they can go to my Facebook page and thank me for showing them a good time as Covetous Shen. It’s a fun page.

BLIZZARD: I know you’re really busy; thanks for spending all this time talking with us, James!