Ellen McLain
Ellen McLain is an actor, born 1952.
Nearly everything McLain is famous for happens in a medium this catalog does not cover. She is the voice of GLaDOS, the antagonist of the Portal games, the Combine Overwatch AI in Half-Life 2, the Administrator in Team Fortress 2 and the Witch in Left 4 Dead 2, which is one of the strongest runs any performer has assembled in video games.
What sits here is the film work that reputation produced, and it is very consistent about what it wants from her. She is the Gipsy Danger artificial intelligence in Pacific Rim, the Gipsy Avenger artificial intelligence in Pacific Rim: Uprising, and TempBot in the animated series Bee and PuppyCat. Three credits, three machines. Directors heard a voice that could deliver a flat, courteous line reading and make it feel faintly threatening, and they cast it for exactly that, over and over.
Movies (2)
TV (1)
Where to start with Ellen McLain
Pacific Rim is the one to watch, and not only because it is the best film of the three. Hearing the same calm synthetic register attached to a giant machine that is mostly on your side is a genuinely different experience from hearing it attached to one that is not.
Pacific Rim: Uprising repeats the assignment with less interesting material around it, and Bee and PuppyCat is the outlier: shorter, weirder, and the only place here where she is allowed to be funny rather than ominous. That is the whole screen filmography, which says something about how completely her real career happened elsewhere.