Genshin Impact developer miHoYo released a new interview with Hu Tao’s voice actor, Rie Takahashi. The company uploaded the video to its official YouTube channel. During the interview, Takahashi talked about her impressions of Hu Tao’s personality and how strange she can be. We have translated some highlights of the interview below.
Hu Tao’s voice actor, Rie Takahashi, showed up to the Genshin Impact interview in casual cosplay of sorts. Her clothing choices were very reminiscent of the funeral parlor director that she voices. Takahashi started by saying she was in love with the character from the start. When she was offered the voice acting job, she only saw Hu Tao from the neck up but was already smitten. Later, when reading through character documents, Takahashi said she was very surprised with how detailed Hu Tao and her story were.
Regarding her vocal performance, the team actually told Takahashi that they wanted her “to make Hu Tao weird.” She was only somewhat surprised by this, as she interpreted the character to have a tricky personality. Takahashi explained that she focused on the rhythm of her character’s speech patterns to nail this aspect. When asked about Hu Tao’s Hilichurl song, Takahashi said she loved hearing each voice actor’s version of it, exclaiming how cute they all sounded.
As for her character traits, Takahashi said she believes Hu Tao has two sides to her personality. One side is mischievous and optimistic, while the other tends to bring up difficult or bothersome subjects. Adding Hu Tao’s occasional sarcasm into the mix, she found it challenging but enjoyable to capture these aspects in her voice. Takahashi also stated that an important aspect of Hu Tao’s personality is not that she is incapable of reading the room in social situations, but that she chooses not to do so.
On a personal note, Takahashi said that she and Hu Tao are similar in how serious they are about their work. However, they are dissimilar in that Hu Tao loves crows, but Takahashi is afraid of them. In the future, the voice actor wants more scenes where Hu Tao interacts with all kinds of characters, especially Xingqiu and Kaeya.
Genshin Impact is available on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 (via backward compatibility), PC, iOS, and Android. Although we haven’t heard much about it, a Nintendo Switch version is still reportedly in development. You can check out our coverage of miHoYo’s previous interview with Keqing’s voice actor here.
