BlizzCon 09: Battlestar Galactica Actress Tricia Helfer Joins StarCraft II Cast

Tricia Helfer, best known for her role as "Number Six" on the recently-concluded television series Battlestar Galactica, will serve as the voice of the character Kerrigan in Blizzard Entertainment's upcoming StarCraft II. The actress' involvement was revealed by the developer's creative head Chris Metzen during a lore-focused, Gamasutra-attended StarCraft II panel during BlizzCon 2009 in Anaheim, California. In the StarCraft fiction, Sarah Kerrigan is a member of the Terran military who is captured by the alien Zerg and eventually becomes that race's overlord, the Queen of Blades. "It's certainly fun to try and find the small differences -- how do you bring Sarah Kerrigan into the Queen of Blades, without completely changing it?" said Helfer of playing the character's duality. "Sarah is more innocent, and the Queen of Blades is just fun." "You get to be that evil side. I think I'm a fairly nice person, but I do a pretty good job of bringing out evilness. It saves on therapy bills. You get to go to work and be mean. [But] Sarah and the Queen of Blades stem from the same person. They are the same person." Still, Helfer is not a video game veteran; she touched on coming into a series with a dedicated fanbase despite her lack of preexisting knowledge about it. "It's intimidating to come into a game and to do a job that you don't really know the history of. I'm not going to pretend. I'm a video game virgin in terms of playing," she said. "It was intimidating not knowing the backstory and the history. But it's an honor to be up here on the panel." Helfer has become increasingly prolific in video game voice acting, playing roles in the upcoming shooter Halo 3: ODST as well as the recent game Spider-Man: Web of Shadows. Glynnis Talken, who played Kerrigan in the original 1998 StarCraft and has voice acted in several other Blizzard games, was previously confirmed as not appearing in the upcoming title. Several returning actors lending their vocal talent to the game were present at the panel, however, including Robert Clotworthy and James Harper, reprising their roles as Jim Raynor and Arcturus Mengsk.