You may have a hard time being vulnerable in front of other people, but at least you don’t have to do it with motion capture cameras strapped to your skull like Assassin’s Creed Shadows actress Masumi, who says she was initially “quite nervous” for her first time using the technology.
“I was quite nervous because… well, first of all, it was my first time,” the Naoe actress tells her Shadows co-star Tongayi Chirisa, who plays the samurai Yasuke, in a recent Ubisoft interview. Shadows – though, we note in our Assassin’s Creed: Shadows review that the game’s story is mostly “lackluster” – was going to use its intense emotional lows to push Masumi underwater.
In particular, the actress describes a “very emotional” moment in Shadows that “begins Naoe’s vengeful journey, basically,” and that was the first motion capture scene she was meant to film.
“That whole week you were in tears,” Chirisa remembers, laughing.
“I really wanted to make sure that I would do an authentic job,” Masumi replies, “that I wouldn’t get thrown off by these cameras that I’m wearing, the helmets, and the whole suit, and the fact that there’s nothing there [during filming]” – only a dummy to cry with, Chirisa supplies.
Despite her doubts, it sounds like Masumi’s first scene was a massive success. Though she says she can’t remember exactly what went down because “the current, the emotion took me,” she knows that “when I was done, I had a standing ovation.”
The finished scene in Assassin’s Creed Shadows is visceral, and Masumi communicates Naoe’s tragedy and fierceness with nuance – no small feat while wearing a camera on your head.
The pivotal scene is also just one of many ways that Masumi was able to subvert what she tells Chirisa she feels is a common trope for characters like Naoe: “A lot of times, Japanese females are portrayed to be very demure.”
“I grew up not really feeling so represented by those characters,” Masumi, who is American-Japanese, continues. “When I got the audition [for Naoe], and I saw that she was a badass […], I was like, ‘yes.'”
