Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s Briana White Forges Community By Wearing Her Heart on Her Sleeve [Interview]

Not only does Final Fantasy VII Rebirth‘s Briana White melt hearts in her Game Award-nominated performance as Aerith Gainsborough, but the actor continues to foster a community of empathy-driven Strange Rebels as a story-based streamer. The Escapist caught up with White on the heels of her Best Performance nomination to discuss the legacy of Aerith, the growth of Strange Rebel Gaming, the healing powers of Life is Strange, and the ideal sweet potato casserole.

The Escapist: I wanted to congratulate you on your Game Awards nomination!

Briana White: Thank you so much!

What’s the story behind hearing the announcement? How did it feel?

Gosh, it felt incredible. It felt like so exciting!

It was really interesting because, for the Golden Joysticks, I was at a convention when those nominations were released, so I was completely focused on something else and I didn’t even think about it. When I found out about the nomination for the Golden Joysticks, I was like just shocked and like: “Whoa, this came from out of nowhere!” Whiplash! Now I got to think about the awards season and all that. It really set everything off.

For the Game Awards nominations, they have a livestream. It was really funny because it started at 9 AM and I logged into the stream at 9:02, but by 10 – first of all, my dad was calling me and I’m like: “Dad, give me a second. I’m busy, I got to watch this stream so I can see if I’m nominated” – and by the time I had gotten into the stream, my category had already been announced and I was getting congratulations messages. 

So, I didn’t actually see myself get announced that I was nominated, but then I went back and watched the VOD later. So, it was very chaotic… in the best sort of way.

Had your dad been calling to congratulate you? Had he heard already? 

No, he just happened to call at the exact moment that I needed my phone to be free. [Laughs]

With the Golden Joystick Award experience, did you feel like that helped prepare you emotionally for this or was it still just as shocking? 

I guess a little bit more prepared. I was a little less like: “Whoa, wait a minute, is that happening? Is it awards season?” 

But, at the same time, I didn’t expect a nomination for myself. Especially knowing that the Game Awards didn’t have a supporting performer category, they just have Best Performance. And that, I really didn’t expect that.

My fellow nominees are all incredible. And for some of them, it’s not their first nomination. And they’ve all been in multiple games as these characters as well. It’s a lot to be standing next to them, metaphorically. 

But I mean, now you’re at the point where you have that legacy with Aerith, too. Like we’re coming up on almost five years of you voicing her.

Which is crazy to think about. 

I sometimes feel like, because Aerith was my first role, I sometimes still have a little Imposter Syndrome about feeling like I belong on that stage and with these nominations. Just because it’s, I mean, it’s my first role. And even though, yes, I’ve been doing it now for five years, and I visited her through three games. It still feels like: “Me? What am I doing here?” 

How do you combat that Imposter Syndrome? 

The thing about Imposter Syndrome is, it’s always going to be there for me, I think. But I don’t let it affect my behavior. And I think that’s the kind of crucial part for me.

When I was recording for [Final Fantasy VII] Remake, the first game, I was hit with such incredible Imposter Syndrome because it’s such a technically challenging process to voice act but also to localize from Japanese into English. I would be like crying in my car thinking like: “This is just too hard. I can’t do this.” 

But I would look at myself in the mirror and tell myself: “Okay, so you feel that way, but you’re still going to go into work tomorrow if they’ll have you, right?” Yep. Yes, I am. [Laughs]

So, Imposter Syndrome, it’s almost like, I have these feelings and I accept and acknowledge them, but at the same time, I’m still going to do what I set out to do. If I don’t belong here, fine. But I am here. I’m going to do my best. And that’s all I can do.

If I don’t feel like I’m doing a good job, what do I need to do to make myself better? I worked with coaches, and I took classes, and I learned everything that I possibly could, and I tried to hone my ear.  All of those things were super challenging, but they helped me feel more prepared when it came to recording for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. So that I could really feel a lot more free and just focus on the acting part of it and not so much the technical part of it. 

Back to the beginning of this relationship with Aerith, and your relationship with kind of the games industry overall, when you first were getting the audition for the role, what was that research process like considering that Final Fantasy has so much lore and expectation that comes with it? 

Well, when I got the audition material, they told me a codename for the game. They didn’t tell me what game it was for. And luckily, because I’m a gamer, I knew already kind of what this was about. 

But I also thought there was no way that they would cast me because I’ve never done anything like this and I’m completely unknown. And her previous English voice actresses are very successful, talented, and famous. You know, Mandy Moore, Mena Suvari, Andrea Bowen, they’re legends, right? And I’m not. 

So, I really thought that I was going to go into it, not book the audition, but maybe they would consider me for like a side character if I did well? Which does happen in this industry quite a lot.

I thought I would never book it, and this would be the funnest audition of my life that I’d never be able to talk about. But, I still prepared for it as if I was going to do my best. You know, despite my expectations, I was still going to do my best. 

I started with a Google search, like many of us do. And of course, the first thing that pops up is [that] Aerith is one of the most legendary iconic characters in gaming because of her death in 1997. It shocked gamers around the world and ripped everyone’s hearts into pieces. That’s part of why I never thought I would become involved with this character because she’s that iconic. 

I watched Advent Children, which is the movie that is a sequel to the original Final Fantasy VII. And I watched some playthroughs on YouTube, and some story synopsis, and I read as much as I could about her character. 

From there, I had to listen to her Japanese voice actress and try to honor her performance. Maaya Sakamoto has been voicing Aerith since the very beginning. She’s never had another Japanese voice actress. I had to honor her performance because I knew that, going into the audition, that would be primarily what the process is involved in. I listened to Maaya’s version in my headphones, and then I give my version based on what the translators have written in my script.

So, I listened to her voice and then listened to all the previous English voice actresses as well. And then I just, I sat here at my streaming setup, and I gave a few takes of the audition and I listened back and I said, “Could I give it a little bit more breath?” And so, I listened back, and then I did it again. I just did that probably for a couple hours, maybe. And then I had the audition the next day. 

Do you think that mentality of going into it with “Oh, I don’t know if I’m really going to get this” helped free you up a bit? 

It must have. I mean, I just went in there wanting to have some fun and like make a cool memory. I had no expectations. And that must have helped me.

But I don’t, it’s so hard to know, even in hindsight. It’s so hard to know how I was perceived by others, or if it was really just my voice. I don’t know. It’s one of those impossible questions. 

Well, you did definitely make quite a few memories in the last five years with Aerith. 

Quite a few.

And you touched on the localization process of making the game and how thorough that was. But I wanted to know, as someone who loves video games and anime, how that felt to be involved in the nitty-gritty of the localization process from the behind-the-scenes perspective? 

It was the coolest thing ever. It still is. Because I know as a fan of these games how exciting it is to anticipate how it’s going to turn out, and then finally get it in your hands and then play it and: “Oh, it’s exactly what I imagined it would be and better.”

And so, then to be a part of the process, being able to have the feeling of: “Oh, I know what’s happening and people are gonna love it!” That like little giddy like “I know something they don’t know” was like just absolutely thrilling! 

But a lot of pressure, of course, too, because I can’t say anything. So all of that was very blended together into one complex, complicated experience.

But for the most part, it was just thrilling to be able to… I’ve said in the past “to see how the sausage is made”, but you don’t want to see how the sausage is made, but you do want to see how video games are made. It’s like watching a behind-the-scenes documentary, but you’re living it. It was really cool.

That’s a little bit of what I wanted to touch on. We’re kind of in an era where so many people who are involved in the video games industry grew up loving games themselves. So how does it feel to balance being like a professional in a fandom space and a fan at the same time? 

I wonder about that sometimes. I wonder if me being such a hardcore fan does affect the roles that I book.

Luckily, or maybe not luckily, I don’t know. When I asked the casting director: “Oh, you called me in because I’m a gamer, right?” She said no. She had no idea that I was a gamer, that I had a YouTube channel, that I was a fan. She had no idea when she called me in.

So, I do wonder sometimes if that affects whether or not people want to bring me in behind the booth. But for the most part, it’s just really cool for me. Because when I’m recording, I really only have access to exactly what I need and nothing more. So, I see Aerith’s lines, and if I need to see the whole conversation, I’ll see the whole conversation. But I don’t get a script ahead of time to see like Barret and Cloud having a conversation. If Aerith’s not involved, I don’t read it. 

When I get to play the game, I then get to be the fan too, because there are parts of the game that I have no idea this was going to happen. And so, I do get to have a little bit of that separation. Honestly, it feels for the most part, like I get the best of both worlds. 

Are there things you remember, in either Remake or Rebirth, that surprised you most when you played it? 

I would say the order of things, in an overarching way. Because we record out of order.

So sometimes, without getting into specifics, the game developers will change the order of some things in order to keep you guessing. Like, “Oh, what’s going to happen?” Well, we all know because we played the original Final Fantasy VII that A happens, B happens, and then C happens. But sometimes in the game, they’ll do A happens, B happens, D happens… is C still going to happen? And then it does.

We all record completely out of order, for the most part. We’ll do sometimes like the main story, and then the side stuff, or, you know, we’ll do pickups of different scenes that weren’t ready yet for us. So, the order of things is completely fresh to me and a total surprise. 

But also sometimes there are things that didn’t happen in the original Final Fantasy VII that the Whispers end up getting involved in, and those things are complete surprises to me.

Speaking of things that aren’t surprising, we touched upon Aerith’s iconic death. Video games are often an escape for people, but also there are a lot of really serious themes that can happen in video games that can help people work through grief, and work through some more serious issues. Could you touch on that balance between video games being an escape, but also being a source of empathy?  

I think Final Fantasy does a really good job of that, specifically. Because when you look at some games that are lauded as being story-based games, it’s almost like it’s very dark, and it completely takes you away from your everyday humdrum life into a darker place. And that can help you put a film over it, a lens over it, to help you look at dark things from a safe distance. 

And that’s actually a studied thing that we use in therapy, right? Like, in order to help process trauma, sometimes you put a lens over it to study it from a distance, or you put someone else in your shoes in order to be able to process it. 

Final Fantasy does that because the stakes are really, really high. I mean, the planet is at stake. It’s life or death, and death is real. Like, a lot of these characters that we know and love are dying, and so the stakes are really high. But it also balances it out with these really silly, goofy moments, and the little vacation at Costa del Sol.

You get to see these characters that have gone through intense emotional trauma, but then they also get to have a little bit of fun.  I really like that about Final Fantasy, because it gives you hope that even if you’re going through a dark time, it won’t always be that way. Even if the stakes of your life are completely so high that you just, you don’t think you’re going to make it out on the other side of whatever situation you’re in, even in that, you can still have fun. You can still make a joke, you can still crack a smile, and you can still hang out with your friends. You don’t have to wallow in it.

I think that’s what I love about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, specifically, is tragedy is present because that’s life. But also, have fun. I think that’s a really beautiful message.

Have you had experiences with, maybe not just video games, but any kind of media where something happened in it that helped you process something in your own life? 

Yeah, I am really, really fond of Life is Strange for that reason.

I had a very tough teenagehood because I’m someone who feels things very deeply. I was called very dramatic as a child. And hey, she became an actor, we can’t be that surprised! But because I feel things very deeply, and especially when the hormones are raging and everybody else is just as hormonal, everything feels like the end of the world, even if it’s just your friend didn’t want to hang out with you that night.

Life is Strange does such a great job of honoring what it means to just be a heart-cracked-open, bleeding-everywhere kind of teenager without patronizing it, and without sugarcoating it, and without making it seem like you’re on the outside looking in. Because on the outside looking in at teenagehood, it can be very: “Wow, you need to calm down. Relax. It’s not that big of a deal.” When you’re on the other side of it. But when you’re in it, it really feels like it is a big deal. And Life is Strange did a really good job of that.

When I finished that game, I really did feel like it healed something in me. It broke me because it’s a very intense game as well, but it healed something in me to know that, yeah, it almost is a universal experience.

I’m glad you touched on feeling things really big, because something I did want to talk to you about is your gaming channel. You cry a lot over there. I think it’s hard to be vulnerable like that. And especially hearing that you felt kinda insecure about that as a teenager. How did you reclaim being vulnerable and crying in public as an adult?

It’s crazy that you bring that up because it’s true. I sorta made a career out of being the crying girl on the internet, which I did not set out to do. To me, it was never an option to be any other way. It’s just who I am.

When I first started my YouTube channel, I played lots of different games trying to figure out what kind of gamer I would be on the internet. There’s gamers who play Minecraft and there’s gamers who play Uncharted. I was the type of gamer that, I tried lots of different things, and ultimately when I played Uncharted people really resonated with the fact that I could talk about the characters and the relationships between them and why this and that scene was so impactful. People really liked that aspect of my gameplays.

So, that is what led me to The Last of Us, which is an incredibly dark and emotional game. At the same time I was playing Life is Strange which, like I said, just cracks me open in the best sort of way. Playing those two games at the same time was just such an intensely emotional experience that I think it cemented the kind of content that people want to see from me. Which was fine, because that’s who I am.

I sort of fell into being a story-based gamer from there. Because that’s who I am, that’s what people wanted to see. They want to see authentic reactions, they want to see people feeling things.

Oftentimes, I’ll get comments like: “I’m a 52-year-old man, I haven’t cried in 20 years, but I cried watching your content.” And I take that as a huge source of pride, that my content could help people, like we talked about earlier, have feelings from a distance that makes them feel safe to have them. I think there’s something really beautiful about that, that my content could help open someone’s heart a little bit and make them feel safe to have their feelings.

I love your philosophy about what a Strange Rebel means to you. Could you talk about that a little bit?

I had always grown up feeling a little out of mainstream. I was never very popular, I was never very normal. And I always very much wanted to be normal, but, somewhere along the line in high school, I grew out of that.

I had a friend, actually, who was completely, loudly, and unapologetically weird. In the best sort of way. Being a theater kid in high school, we all sort of embraced this like: “We’re not normal and we don’t belong in the mainstream, and that’s great! That’s so much more fun than being normal.” And I think that’s where I picked up this like: “Being average, being normal… that’s not something you should want.”

I took this idea of being a rebel to mean going against the mainstream, but not in a bad way. Not in a way that’s “wears all black and is angsty and mean”. I don’t want to be a rebel in that I want to hurt other people. I want to be a strange rebel. I want to be a rebel in a way that makes the world a little bit better. I want to be a rebel in the fact that I do cry on the internet and I don’t feel bad about that.

It’s easy to be mean to others. It’s easy to close your heart off when you’ve experienced bad things. But it’s strange and beautiful to do the opposite of that. I want people to embrace being rebelliously compassionate and rebelliously kind. That’s sort of where Strange Rebel comes from and that’s really a huge part of my mission.

I wanted to ask about the channel and how you’ve seen that community grow since Final Fantasy?

It’s amazing. I mean, when I started out on the internet all I ever heard was that it’s a terrible place. That’s all I ever heard. I heard about harassment, and women being chased off platforms, and I heard about toxicity in gaming. But, what I found on the internet is that most people are really good and kind, and they just want to share their passions.

I started my channel reading every single comment that was left on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, whatever platform. I’d read every single comment, every single message that someone sends me. And I pretty much still do to this day, which is a lot harder now, but I really make an effort to do that. Because if someone goes out of their way to watch my content and then leave me a message that says: “I loved this”, I want to pay back the respect that they’re showing me to give me their time of day and give them the time of day by at least reading it and giving them a like if I can. I’ve found that when I engage with them, that only comes back to me tenfold. Because they’re good people, and I like them. I like them as people.

I mean, now, we’re part of a really amazing, bustling, thriving Discord where we have movie nights, we have a cooking club, we just started a book club, we do video hangouts every single month, we play games together twice a week. We are there for each other. We meet up at conventions with each other. People in my Discord have found love. I mean, a couple people in my Discord have gotten married after finding each other in my Discord!

I cannot state enough just how proud I am of being able to bring people together in that way because they no longer feel alone. What better thing could I do in this life than bring people together? To celebrate each other, be there for each other, support each other in hard times, and share each other’s passions. And all in an amazingly respectful way.

They’re so generous. We’ve raised over $50K for charity, just in my Discord in the past four years.

The fact that Final Fantasy is a huge part of my channel, I do think that that really brings in a good audience. A good group of people that care about the world through the amazing stories that Final Fantasy tells.

But really, I don’t care much for numbers, how many subscribers I have, or how many views I get on a video. What I care about is the fact that people have found others like them, that give them faith in humanity, that give back to others. They’re not alone in this universe anymore. That’s everything to me. That’s so much more important than everything else.

Community building is huge, and it sounds like you’ve curated a wonderful community.

I try, but I don’t do it alone. I have a community manager, Jeff, who does an amazing job running all these events and planning, like, we have a yearly gaming triathlon where we all play games and compete in order to raise more money. We’ve even had a custom Dungeons & Dragons Strange Rebel Gaming themed one-shot! We’ve done so many amazing, incredible things because of Jeff.

I mean it when I say I haven’t done it alone. Every person who joins the community is as much a part of the community building as me. And I try to throw that back to them as much as I can. And people say: “Thank you for making the Discord.” No, thank you for being a part of it! It’s not me in there chatting all day, it’s you all.

I wanted to ask before we leave if there’s anything in your life right now that’s bringing you joy, be it games you’re playing, things you’re watching, people in your life. What’s fueling you right now?

Well, the holidays are coming up, and I’m a big family person. So, being able to see my family is everything to me. I’m excited to see everyone.

Actually, after this, I’m making a sweet potato casserole that can feed 30 people.

Do you do the marshmallows on top?

No. So, I used to work at a restaurant called Ruth’s Chris [Steak House] that has the hands-down best sweet potato casserole ever! Because it’s, if you look at the ingredients, it’s basically cake, but with a sweet potato base. The top is brown sugar and pecans and butter and then it crisps up in the oven, so it’s like a crust. It’s almost like an upside down sweet potato cake.

It’s mind-blowing. If you’ve never had it, you must!

It’s so good. I am not welcome at Thanksgiving without it. I am not allowed to show up without this sweet potato casserole, every single year for like seven years now. People demand this sweet potato casserole. I just get better at it every year.

I love family. Family’s really important to me, that keeps me going. Like I said, my dad was calling me the other day. My parents are very proud of me right now, which is really nice to hear!

And your mom’s a gamer, too! How does it feel to have that family legacy now being in video games yourself?

It’s crazy because my mom’s a gamer and I keep asking her to play my game, and she won’t do it!

The games for her are like Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, so with the Z-targeting, the camera’s really manageable. Final Fantasy, she missed a few generations of games where you learn to control the camera with the other stick, so camera control is really hard for her. But maybe one day.

But still, they’re very proud and very supportive, even if they can’t play my game.

For more from Briana White, check out her Game Award-nominated performance as Aerith Gainsborough in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, her Strange Rebel Gaming social media community, and her signature Thanksgiving dish on Ruth’s Chris’ official website.