Dispatch features a lot of characters, and you’re going to recognize the voices behind all of them. AdHoc Studio’s upcoming Telltale-like superhero workplace comedy, where you play as a former superhero who oversees a team of superpowered misfits, stars actors like Aaron Paul, acclaimed voice actors like Laura Bailey, YouTuber Jacksepticeye, and many more. Jeffrey Wright, no stranger to voice work after starring in The Last of Us Part 2 and Batman: The Audio Adventures, voices something of a mentor figure for player character Robert Robertson in Dispatch.
Wright plays Chase, a Flash-like former superhero whose superspeed powers rapidly age him; he’s 40 going on 80. “We get to have the old mentor, but then he can also be funny and quick and maybe also a lot of the humor can come from the fact that he’s still not a kid, but he’s an adult, you know, he’s not an old man,” Nick Herman, director and co-founder of AdHoc Studio, told Polygon over a video call.
AdHoc created the character before Wright was cast, and didn’t have too much time to get the actor up to speed before sticking him in the recording booth.
“You only get so much time to prep and talk about the character,” Herman said. “We hopped in to start recording and Jeffrey just started going, just started reading through his lines super fast and Pierre [Shorette, AdHoc Co-Founder and Dispatch writer] and I immediately looked at each other and we’re like, ‘Oh no, he’s just phoning it in.’”
Herman worried Wright was “just trying to get the hell out of here, move on to the next gig.” What Herman and AdHoc quickly realized, however, was that Wright was doing the exact opposite of phoning it in, and instead making character choices to flesh out Chase.
“It took us a couple lines to realize, ‘Oh, no, this is a character choice, I get it now,’” Herman said. “He’s talking fast, he’s kind of moving, and it was so not what we had expected for the character, and ended up being just a brilliant choice on Jeffrey’s part.” Wright’s Chase onboards Robert on his first day, and delivers a sharp joke to introduce each member of Robert’s superhero team that he’ll dispatch out on assignments (on the carnival strongman Punch Up: “He’s got all the charm and brains of a greasy bowling ball”).
Perhaps, however, Wright’s speedy delivery in the booth was actually him being in a hurry — he’s a busy, in-demand actor, after all. Either way, his performance is a standout in Dispatch. “Maybe he did need to get out of there,” Herman said, “but we’ll take advantage of it.”
