Rei Ayanami from Neon Genesis Evangelion and Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop are two wildly different characters. The former is cold, mission-oriented and socially withdrawn, whereas the latter is aggressive yet lazy, as well as skilled at manipulating people.
Megumi Hayashibara voicing such different characters so well is a testament to her range, but according to the seiyuu's autobiography -- Megumi Hayashibara's The Characters Taught Me Everything: Living Life One Episode at a Time -- she actually received very similar direction for both characters. Both Rei and Faye demanded that Hayashibara restrain her typical emotional expressiveness, albeit for very different reasons.
Hayashibara's chapter on voicing Rei Ayanami is focused on her attempts to understand why the voice directors kept telling her to "suppress your voice" while playing the Evangelion Unit-00 pilot. Because she was constantly told to restrain her expressiveness while playing Rei, Hayashibara initially began to wonder if Rei was a character who lacked emotions. However, when she asked Hideaki Anno about Rei's character, the director gave the response, "Rei is not emotionless. She is just unfamiliar with emotions."
What exactly it means to be "unfamiliar with emotions" without being "emotionless" puzzled Hayashibara, so she went to psychology textbooks to better understand Rei. After a lot of analysis and personal soul-searching, the voice actress ultimately came to the conclusion that most displays of emotional expression are meant for other people's sake and that as a result, there is often a disconnect between the emotions people feel and the ones they express. Rei Ayanami, in contrast, is unable to create such a distinction.
"[Rei's] feelings and words are directly connected," Hayashibara writes. "If she doesn't know something, that's that. She can't pretend to do otherwise. If she hates something, she can't pretend to like it. Her pain and anguish are real. But she doesn't put on an act of that suffering to get other people to worry about her. Deceit, dramatics, exaggeration, manipulation -- she doesn't do any of that!" By eliminating all of the excesses of emotional performativity, Hayashibara was able to portray Rei in a restrained manner that was nonetheless honest to the character's emotions.
Playing Faye Valentine likewise forced Megumi Hayashibara to restrain her emotional expressiveness, but this was as a result of Cowboy Bebop's generally more realistic style as opposed to Faye being a particularly restrained character. While a real-life version of Rei Ayanami would immediately strike one as unusual and likely neurodivergent, Faye's emotional expressiveness would likely appear perfectly ordinary in many real-life settings. Anime, however, is not real life, and voice actors are naturally used to exaggeration.
According to Hayashibara, "Voice recording for an anime session requires 1.5 times the usual amount of 'surprise,' 'sadness,' et cetera... But there wasn't a single trace of that typical, standard anime-style exaggeration in this series. Characters woke up, smoked, and went to the toilet like normal people, even if strange things happened in between. It took me a great deal of time to get the hang of that unexpected normalcy." She describes director Shinichiro Watanabe and the rest of the Cowboy Bebop crew as being "incredibly laid-back" -- a trait she was initially envious of but eventually came to emulate and embrace.
Rei and Faye are just two of the most beloved of Hayashibara's many voice acting credits over the past 40 years, and her insights into her characters and craft are fascinating. Those who wish to read more about her work should seek out Megumi Hayashibara's The Characters Taught Me Everything: Living Life One Episode at a Time, now available in English from Yen Press.
