She got on well with her stepfather but did not get to know her biological father until she was in her twenties, and her relationship with her mother was a difficult one. “She was in a lot of emotional pain,” Hale told me. “When you’re a kid, you don’t know that. You just know someone’s screaming at you, and flailing at you and kicking you around mentally and emotionally.” Hale’s mother told young Jennifer that she was half Native American; that she was born so premature that she nearly died; that she was descended from the Pilgrims at Plymouth. None of this was true, but it may have helped prepare Hale for a lifetime of pretending to be other people. She now thinks that her mother’s prevarications must have been a way of assuaging a crippling sense of inferiority.

One of Hale’s first acting roles was when, as a teen-ager in Birmingham, she was asked to perform voice-over on the radio and paid thirty-five dollars for her trouble. “For talking,” she said. “For talking! I was out of my mind.” She believes that one of the reasons she was hired for the job was that her mother had discouraged her from speaking with a Southern accent. She went on to study acting at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and at Birmingham-Southern College, but found that the latter’s program did not suit her. “The style was broader than what I was interested in doing,” she told me. “I wanted something more filmic.” Hale got a degree in business, she says, because “you gotta eat.”

When she auditioned for her first film—an NBC movie of the week—amazingly, she booked the part. After other roles, she was selected, out of six thousand aspirants, during a nationwide search conducted by the soap opera “Santa Barbara.” “At the time, I wore giant T-shirts and baggy pants and there were some seriously hot girls in this line. I was, like, ‘How did this happen?’ ” Hale did a couple of episodes of “Santa Barbara.” After that, she worked steadily as a regional actor, but, in search of “a bigger game to play,” made the inevitable move to Los Angeles.

In the nineties, Hale made the rounds on shows that reliably cycled through young actors—“Melrose Place,” “ER,” “Charmed”—but after two years of this she began to look for more stable and lucrative work. She told me, “I thought, Well, I’ll just take voice-over and see if I can make some money there.” In 1994, she had landed her first cartoon series, “Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?” To the best of Hale’s recollection, she had, at that point, never watched a cartoon from start to finish. She struggled, initially, with the unfamiliar demands of cartoon voice-over, and enrolled in cartoon-acting classes, where, she said, she learned how to “bring a tiny being to life,” and to travel “so far away from my physical self and stretch my voice to a different place.”

It was through “Carmen Sandiego” that Hale discovered video-game acting. The cartoon series spawned a video-game spinoff, and Hale was brought in to record for it. She was startled by the disassociated, scattershot approach of the process, as when she was asked to record dozens of geographic factoids. “We’re doing how many flags?” she remembers thinking. “I have to say the name of how many countries? How is this going to be used?” She shrugged. “I didn’t get it.”

From there, Hale moved into commercial voice-over. When she was starting out, the field was dominated by men, but she begged her agent to give her scripts written for male actors and, to her agent’s surprise, began getting those roles, too. Hale noted, “Nowadays, you hear a lot more women narrating commercials.” When I asked Hale if she felt similarly proud of having broken into action video games, which is probably the most male-oriented voice-over field of all, she smiled. “I like to take the boys’ jobs,” she said.

For years, video-game voice-over was often supplied by game developers themselves, with predictably indifferent results. One of the first game franchises to pioneer the use of high-profile film and television actors in video games was Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto, though in the past few years Rockstar has moved in the opposite direction, hiring relatively unknown talent for prominent roles. Michael Hollick’s Niko Bellic, in Grand Theft Auto IV, and Rob Wiethoff’s John Marston, in Red Dead Redemption, are generally ranked among the finest video-game performances to date, and the performances are extraordinary, in part, because of the unfamiliarity of the actors’ voices. Overexposure is thus a pressing concern for video-game actors, and Hale spoke several times of her worries that, one day, her voice might be thought too recognizable.

The voice-over community is, by acting standards, an unusually cordial one. Hale’s friend Nolan North, who portrays Nathan Drake in the Uncharted franchise and is possibly the most recognizable male voice in video games today, enthused about the supportive nature of the community. “It’s not filled with jealousy,” he said. “We’re never mad at each other for getting something.” North believes that this collegiality is a by-product of the invisibility of video-game actors in the culture at large. “If you’re talented and a handful, there’s no place for you,” he said. He also pointed out another consequence of invisibility: “Everybody essentially makes the same amount of money, too. There’s not the disparity of income you see in other areas of acting.”

“We’re paid a flat fee,” Hale told me. “We get no percentage of any kind. That fee is based on union scale. If you’re very lucky, you can get over scale.” A few years ago, she said, she was paid twelve hundred dollars for a game that made two hundred and seventy million. I asked if that was at all galling, but she deflected my question, pointing out that game developers “do all the front-end work, and they do all the back-end work.” David Hayter, a friend of Hale’s who portrays Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid franchise, is rumored to have been paid more than the industry average for his performances as Snake, though he would not comment on that. A successful screenwriter whose credits include “X-Men” and “Watchmen,” Hayter is so deeply associated with Snake that it has become, effectively, his only role. Apart from those projects which his “twelve-year-old self couldn’t say no to”—he recently agreed to play a Jedi in a LucasArts game, for instance—Hayter has more or less given up video-game acting, which makes him slightly more willing to discuss the ways in which game actors are paid and, arguably, underpaid. “The video-game industry is actively trying not to go the ways of movies, with residuals and things like that,” Hayter told me. “If you starred in a movie that made two hundred and fifty million, you’d get more for your next movie. That doesn’t happen in games. You get, maybe, double scale.” But then video-game actors lease a smaller portion of their essence than film actors do; voices, after all, are more interchangeable than faces.

Toward the end of her day at the studio, Hale came to a scene with a character referred to as A/K. It was the most emotional scene of the day, and also one of the most technically tricky, because of the ways that players’ choices in Mass Effect 1 and 2 carry over into the new sequel. A/K refers to two characters, Ashley and Kaiden, both of whom are Shepard’s teammates in Mass Effect 1 (and, depending on Shepard’s gender, potential love interests). Shepard, however, is forced to save one character and sacrifice the other, and, in Mass Effect 2, whichever of the two was saved reappears to remonstrate with him or her. The result of that conversation, which can play out in various ways, determines how the character of A/K will interact with Shepard in Mass Effect 3.