Gina Carano Confirms Her Voice Was Altered For 'Haywire'

When we ran the first five minutes of Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, starring Gina Carano, a few people mentioned something interesting in the comments. Those who've followed Carano's MMA career said that her voice, as heard in the clip from the film, didn't sound much at all like Carano.

Turns out there's a reason. We know that Steven Soderbergh was taken enough with Carano's physical presence to build a film around her. Some of that appeal may have been that she's an unknown quantity on film. And it seems that Soderbergh wanted to emphasize every possible difference between Gina Carano and the character she plays on screen, so with Carano's participation he did some work to alter her voice for the film.

On the No Holds Barred podcast (via TMZ) Carano said,

Steven Soderbergh wanted Mallory and Gina to be two completely different entities. I think in the sports world you end up falling in love with the person that is Gina Carano, and it makes it a little bit more difficult to take me and put me into a Mallory Kane type of character. And so he did do some altering and mixing... and we went back into ADR and he worked really hard at making Mallory be a different entity. And he did a really genius job in that. It's just an honor to be part of it, whether there's altering or not. THere's a little joke I was saying: even if he would have shaved my head and put Bill Clinton as my voice I would have still done it.

Given that Carano was a willing participant in the alteration, this doesn't seem like a big deal. It's not like she saw the film and discovered that James Earl Jones' voice had been laid over her own. People are altered all the time for their appearances in films, whether via makeup, prosthetics, or digital manipulation.

So there's not even a huge story here, even if some of the ADR and voice alteration also had to do with enhancing Carano's relative lack of acting skills. That sort of correction happens relatively frequently, too. But for those who were already fans of Carano and wondered what was going on after watching the clip, now you know.