Arguably one of the most popular first-person shooters is Overwatch; the more concisely dubbed “hero shooter” was released by Blizzard Entertainment in 2016 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows, in October 2019 for the Nintendo Switch, and just this month the massively overhauled “sequel” Overwatch 2 was released for free on all major platforms.
The game divides players into two teams of six, with each player choosing from a large roster of characters with unique abilities. These teams work together to complete map-specific objectives in a short amount of time. But one of the things that makes the game unique and has attributed to its popularity is the astounding cast of voice actors that give life to the large cast of characters.
Of these characters, one of the most iconic is that of Pharah, a highly decorated soldier who soars through the air in a Raptora combat suit armed with a launcher that fires high-explosive rockets. Actress Jen Cohn has been the voice of Pharah since the game’s release in 2016 and, along with her co-stars, has been a darling of the Con scene ever since. Jen was gracious enough to join me in a conversation about her career, her love of the gaming community, and her upcoming new projects.
Entertainment Writer G.A. Lungaro: Jen Cohn seems to be the title. Do they actually call you Jen or is it just Jen Cohn?
Jen Cohn: Isn’t that hilarious? You know what, I’m very lucky to have this like short staccato two syllables, like bah-bam name. So people, when they address me, tend to call me Jen, but I think that the “Jen Cohn-ness” works, so I’m down with it. Jen Cohn is good; that works. It’s very funny.
G.A. Lungaro: Works good, right? I’m, GA, Giuseppe, whatever’s easier for you. I like all my names, so it doesn’t matter to me.
Jen Cohn: Giuseppe is a fabulous name. That’s a very lucky name. Yeah, I mean, Jen Cohn is basically the John Smith of Jewish girls, so it’s like, seriously, like we’re all named Jen Cohn. I went to a Jewish sleepaway camp. Every third kid was Jen Cohn, and we all got our sleepaway camp packages crossed and the mail, and, but most of those Cohns are Cohens, C-O-H-E-N, so the only differentiating factor was the no E.
G.A. Lungaro: So you’re East Coast?
Jen Cohn: I live in New York; I came in from LA this week. But I’m New York City most of the time.
GA Lungaro: So I read that New York was a kind of breeding ground for voice actors. How did the community help you in your career and influence your work as a voice actor?
Jen Cohn: Oh God. Well, so a very smart voice actor by the name of Mike Landry, years and years ago, I mean, God, almost how many years ago? Almost 20 years ago, he explained it to me as that there’s a much greater pool of voice actors in Los Angeles than there are in New York, but the tight community of New York voice actors are all better. So, this smaller community where everyone is amazing, whereas in LA, it’s a much bigger community where there’s like more variety of who’s great right and who’s not. That was his read on having done both. And now I, as someone who’s bi-coastal, I can’t really say because the way that it used to work was we were all in rooms together.
When I started out in voiceover, you would go from appointment to appointment to appointment at casting houses all day. And so you’d spend your whole day running around and so you knew everybody, like you knew everybody who you could potentially be up against and you could be reading within your age range, who the other people who did character voices.
There tends to be more commercial work in New York and more animation and gaming in Los. Now it’s much more mixed because everything is done online and everything is done virtually. So it’s possible. But back then it was like if you did ads, you mostly If you did ads, you were in New York. If you did animation, you were in LA and that was where you saw it.
And everyone knew everyone. And the best thing about the voiceover community, in general, is it’s really all for one and one for. Because once you get into the room and voiceover, it’s any man’s game. Like the hardest thing is getting into the room is getting represented, having great agents, and having casting directors know you getting called in.
Once you’ve made that hurdle, literally anybody could get it because everyone is really good and it’s good enough, and it’s just a matter of perspective. So you were able to genuinely. These lovely relationships with everyone and you all could root each other on, and everybody was friends. And you could go out to lunch with people after your sessions and after auditions.
And when you have a baby, you bring your kid to the audition, you leave your kid, and someone else is laughing, come back out. Like your kid knows all the other voice actors. Yeah. And. It’s a magical thing, and it’s very different than TV or film or theater auditions where you can walk in, and you can feel the tension, and everybody’s eyeing everyone else, and everybody’s nervous.
And there’s this real discomfort from the people who are uncomfortable. There’s none of that in voiceover. I mean, it’s genuine happiness to see everyone, and doing voiceover, you have to take very specific direction and be both a technician and easily directed, which means you should be very smart.
You have to be smart and technical-minded, and voiceover actors tend to have a lot of stuff going on and tend to be very smart. So it’s a very cool community; I feel I have a lot to thank the video community for.
GA Lungaro: The amount of, and I know this comes with any kind of creative job, the amount of rejection you have to go through to break in, it’s hard to get that first break. So as far as you, when you first started out, what was your first gig as a voice actor and how was that?
Jen Cohn: I love this question. I have to tell you, I auditioned for years before I got my first big animation gig, and I got rejected for years before anything happened. My first voiceover job, which was when I sort of got bitten, was when I was in college. I went to college in Boston, and I was working on this show outside of school. I was a theater major, and I did an ad for BayBank. I think I was 19 or 20, and I did a BayBank ad and I loved getting to do it.
It was really fun. I’m a good listener, so I liked getting directed. When I moved to New York City and doing these terrible, off, off-Broadway in the gutter, horrible place, I kept on having producers come up to me and say, your voice is great. I got pulled into the studio, and I remember hearing, as I was walking in, through the sound system, I could hear a very familiar commercial voice. This man’s voice (mimic’s voice), like one of those kinds of voices. And I was like, oh my God. I was imagining this brylcreemed besuited man would be in the booth when I came in. And in fact, he was sweaty and wearing a tank top, and it was stained.
I was going, oh my God, like voices don’t sound anything like what they look like. It was this eureka moment to me, even though I’d been doing character voices for years and I knew to change it, but the reality that I could look like anything and sound like something very different was incredibly creatively freeing. That led to my first real job that I got paid decently for. I did Rooms To Go, this furniture company in Florida. I did their ads and I was like, whoa, this is great.
I did a bunch of, before I joined the union and was well known, small commercial ads. And then I did all of these ads, you know, like when you’re watching late-night cable, and there would be commercials for albums coming out. I’d be like, you know, ‘the new album by Lenny Kravitz,’ blah, blah. I would do those things. They were great, and I just loved the idea that I could wear anything. I could look like anything. It was really fun. I had to think about timing. I learned quickly that I was good at shaving a second or you know, or stretching, you know, a half a second or doing those things.