MANILA, August 12 ------ Voice talent Inka Magnaye is still in cloud nine weeks since she first learned that she will voice the Scarab in the Philippine release of Warner Bros. Pictures' upcoming movie, "Blue Beetle."
“[I learned about it when I got] an email from Warner Bros. I didn’t see the email myself because I have my wonderful team behind me doing that. They sent the email to our chat group without anything, just the screenshot of the email. And then I looked at it, I was a little confused. I’m like, ‘What? Oh my gosh! This is real!’” she said in a press conference on Wednesday.
Magnaye said she was on a high for the next few days and even until now. “It’s sinking in little by little. I don’t even know if I am fully here. At the back of my head, there is an Inka going, ‘Is this really happening? I am dreaming right?’” Magnaye said discovering that she was personally selected for the role made it even more significant. “We had a call with Warner Bros. I was like, ‘Yeah. Okay!’ It made my year. They wanted me from the very beginning of everything,” she said.
While she did her regular physical preparation for the role, given her familiarity doing voiceovers, she felt that she needed to invest more effort into her mental preparation given how big this project is. “It was quite the same as any other voice over gig but also with the knowledge and understanding that it was the biggest. I was walking into that studio conditioning myself to be like, ‘Okay, let’s get this voice right because this is the recording. There’s no do-over here after this is done.’ So I did a lot of trying to look for my most-AI voice because that’s something that I like to do,” she said. “It’s more of the mental preps knowing that this is going to be the biggest project I’ve ever taken on so far. This is going to make waves. There’s a different kind of responsibility knowing that I am the first ever Philippine-based Filipino talent that DC is going to get for their superhero movie,” she added.
When she lent her voice to the Scarab, Magnaye said the biggest challenge was how to set her voice apart from all the other voices in superhero movies. “I’d like to put a mark on that. I want people to set that apart from others. I think to make it sound more personal while making it sound synthetic is the challenge there – finding the balance to do that.” Magnaye will voice the Scarab, described by Warner Bros. Philippines in a statement as "an ancient alien relic pivotal to the titular DC Super Hero's story."
Called Khaji-Da, the Scarab is voiced by singer-actress Becky G in the original version of the movie. According to Warner Bros. Philippines, Magnaye is the first Philippine-based Filipino talent to do voiceover work in a DC film. The movie will come out in theaters nationwide on August 16.
Source: news.abs-cbn.com