'It really truly changed my life in every possible way': Lady Dimitrescu actor says her Resident Evil Village role was just as transformative for her as it was for roughly half the internet in 2021

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Many such cases.

Resident Evil Village - Lady Dimitrescu
(Image credit: Capcom)

Lady Dimitrescu first appeared in a January 2021 teaser trailer that quickly cemented Resident Evil Village's place in the public consciousness as "the game with the big vampire lady." She swept the hearts, minds, and creative outputs of hordes of fan artists with such ferocity that I'm still not sure whether I could safely do a google image search on my work browser. According to Maggie Robertson, the actor who brought the vampire giantess to life, the role was equally transformative for her.

(Image credit: Maggie Robertson)

Many of the interviewed Pixel Pack actors, like Mass Effect femshep actor Jennifer Hale, spoke about a fading distinction that used to separate videogame acting talent from their theater and stage peers. Echoing that sentiment, Robertson said that her Lady Dimitrescu performance was informed by her history in Shakespearean acting.

"Having a Shakespeare background, I pulled a lot of Shakespeare stuff into this. There was something very Shakespearean in the way that she utilizes language," Robertson said. "It's not just the claws, it's not just her transforming into a beast at the end that does damage. It's her words. She really uses the power of her words to hurt."

I can't speak to how well Shakespeare's works channel the presence of a towering monster lady, but being able to employ those more traditional acting techniques for her Dimitrescu performance clearly paid off—even if Robertson wasn't entirely prepared for the impact the character would have.

(Image credit: Capcom)

"I had no concept at that time of what being in a video game could offer me in my career, in my life. My only intention was to do the best work that I could do and, honestly, not make a fool of myself," Robertson said. "And then to see the way that she was embraced by audiences, it was just very surreal. It really truly changed my life in every possible way."

Since playing Lady Dimitrescu in Resident Evil Village, Robertson has continued her voice and motion capture performances in games like God of War: Ragnarok, Baldur's Gate 3, and more.

We spoke to Robertson back in 2021, where she went into deeper detail about the overlap between her theater background and her work in Resident Evil. Comparing her experience in Lady Dimitrescu's motion capture sessions—her first time doing performance capture—to black box theater, Robertson said her classical acting background made her "uniquely primed" to inhabit the role.

"It's just playing. It goes back to being a kid and using your imagination to create these fabulous worlds," Robertson said. "That feels like it gets at the real core of why I wanted to be an actor in the first place."

Lincoln Carpenter
Lincoln Carpenter
News Writer

Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.

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