BlizzCon 2017: Voices of Blizzard – United Nations of Overwatch Panel

The great thing about watching these voice actor panels is how excited everyone seems to get. Yesterday’s Powerful Women of Warcraft was pretty energetic, but the United Nations of Overwatch panel was extremely high energy, with both the audience and the participants at a high energy level. Even Andrea Toyias, the presenter of the panel, was so excited to be there that it’s kind of infectious.

There was a pretty packed house for this panel, including the following:

• Darin DePaul, the human body that Reinhardt inhabits
• Johnny Cruz, who practically is Lucio
• Jen Cohn, Pharah’s voice actor and person who has amazing pants
• Aysha Selim who plays Ana Amari and can probably kill you
• Chloe Hollings voice of Widowmaker, who is glad you don’t think she’s like Widowmaker
• Sahr Ngauah, who plays Doomfist and actually did a Seismic Slam on the floor
• Michael Chu, lead writer for Overwatch

First off, if you ever get the chance to see Darin DePaul do anything I recommend you do so. I don’t really care what it is. If Darin DePaul wants to come to your house and sleep on your couch? Let him. Watching him talk about the improv process that led to the Reinhardt cinematic and how they worked through scenes together was pretty amazing. The great thing about all of the panelists is that they tell some amazing stories, whether it’s Johnny Cruz talking about the bad movies that he’s done or  Jen Cohn exclaiming that this is her first convention.

Michael Chu let slip (probably joking) that Pharah’s father is named Sam, but I think he’s just messing with us.

I feel like I can’t give you the real experience of hearing these actors talk about why they play the characters the way they do. Chloe Hollings used to wear major high heels when voicing Widowmaker just to try and get into the Widowmaker headspace, just as an example. And getting to hear Michael Chu’s insights into each character’s motivation and backstory is very interesting, although man he’s evasive. Still, his deadpan reaction to how they found Sahr Ngauah was pretty amazing, and Sahr himself may have been my favorite part of the panel. Both he and Jen Cohn were so excited to be at a convention at all. And man, when Sahr tells you to sit down, you will definitely feel like you should sit down.

Also great is the part of the panel where Andrea Toyias gets the actors to read their lines from the game. I could watch Darin DePaul yell Catchphrase! all day. Also, Chloe Hollings will scare the hell out of you. Seriously.

The Q&A was amazing just for Sahr getting to try on a fan’s Doomfist arm. So yeah. No big shocking revelations about the characters, aside from Sam, Pharah’s dad of course. But really awesome to get to watch the process behind finding those iconic voices.