Making Clive sexy: in conversation with Ben Starr and Susannah Fielding from Final Fantasy 16

Let’s be honest, Clive isn’t exactly the most glamorous name for a Final Fantasy lead character. But it could’ve been worse.

At a recent preview event for the game (in which I questioned the essence of the series), I sat down with Clive Rosfield’s voice actor Ben Starr, as well as the voice of Jill Warrick, Susannah Fielding, to chat about their roles in the game.

Read on as we discuss the pressures of being part of such a huge series, the details of each performance, and which Final Fantasy games are their favourites.

So you get the call to say you’ve got the role in Final Fantasy 16. How did you feel in that moment?

Susannah Fielding: We didn’t know that it was Final Fantasy. And very often you don’t, you work under codenames because it’s such a secret, so you don’t realise until much later down the line.

Ben Starr: I think I got the call, which was ‘congratulations, you are the lead in a video game’. You’re like, ‘okay?!’. And then it wasn’t until they said, ‘come back in to see if you can read for your younger self’, that they gave me a bit more information about this and they said you can have the scripts to have some idea. My character at the time was codenamed Clint Richmond. Do you remember what yours was? It would have been like J something?

S: Jane…Jane Adams, or something.

B: I couldn’t believe it, but as soon as you find out, you can’t tell anyone about it. What’s been amazing is working with lots of different actors and realising this is quite a big thing.

S: I’m not really a gamer, but even I’ve heard of Final Fantasy. Even for me I was aware of the magnitude of it.

It’s funny, you mentioned the codenames as being regular names, but Jill and Clive are also quite regular names. In the past we’ve had Cloud and Squall, but now we’ve got Clive. That’s not very Final Fantasy?!

B: We did have a joke early on pretending to be Aunty Jill and Uncle Clive from down the road having an adventure together.

S: They’re like names from Coronation Street rather than Final Fantasy.

B: I will say, Jill has already been taken obviously, for Resident Evil fans. I watched Air two days ago [film about Nike signing Michael Jordan], and Viola Davis plays [Jordan’s] mother. She says ‘a shoe is just a shoe until my son steps into it’. And I’ve been using that as an example of ‘Clive is just a name until Clive steps into it’. Now I feel it’s very normal and keep going ‘Clive – yeah that is a sexy name’.

S: We’re reimagining the name Clive, for all those Clives out there.

B: We are re-envisaging Clive for the 21st century.

Excellent. So when you finally realised this is Final Fantasy and you stepped into the recording booth to start recording, did you feel a lot of pressure? This is such a huge series, did you feel the weight of that?