Finding Relena: Exploring A Gundam Heroine's Legacy With Voice Actor Lisa Ann Beley
by Lauren Orsini,
But my relationship with Gundam Wing itself is more complicated. For years, I had a particularly fraught relationship with the show's heroine, Relena. Bluntly, I found her annoying. She was pushy, naive, and worst of all, idealistic. In a show whose central mission was to deliver cool robot battles to our eyeballs, she was a relentless advocate for peace.
I'd planned to write a personal essay about my feelings about one of Gundam's most polarizing heroines. But over the course of my research, I ended up tracking down somebody with an even more complicated relationship with Relena: her English voice actor, Lisa Ann Beley.
And it just so happened that we live in the same city.
Relena was an unusually youthful role for a 30-year-old Beley. In the first arc of Gundam Wing, Relena celebrated her 15th birthday. Beley incorporated a high register to account for Relena's age and precise enunciation to emphasize Relena's regal bearing. In the English dub of Gundam Wing, I can hear her pronounce each separate “e” in “Heero Yuy.” Her words stand apart from one another in perfect clarity, like little houses each separated by a picket fence.
When I looked up Lisa Ann Beley, I quickly learned that she has since moved to Washington, D.C., along with her husband, Jonathan Holmes, also a former Gundam voice actor. She is a teacher at the Shakespeare Theater Company Academy, specializing in voice and speech. She has worked as a dialect coach with actors like Daniel Radcliffe and Freddie Highmore.
But I couldn't find any of her contact information. She'd made all her social media accounts private. What's more, I learned that Beley has only conducted a single on-camera interview about her anime voice acting work in 2022, and she stopped voice acting and attending fan conventions in the early 2000s.
Finally, I managed to set up an interview with Beley at a teahouse that was local to us both. I instantly recognized her clear, careful enunciation as the voice of Relena. Even speaking with her in a casual setting, my untrained ear still heard that vocal precision—a separation of syllables that defines Beley's well-trained speech.
It turned out there was a very natural reason for Beley to lock down her online presence. After she had a child (who is now 19 and also an occasional voice actor who has worked on titles like Adventure Time), she wanted to make herself less accessible for her daughter's safety.
“I heard stories, and I have a lot of friends who work in the industry, and some of them are quite up there. You know Brian Drummond [voice of Gundam Wing's Zechs Merquise and Dragon Ball Z's Vegeta]. I just got a little protective, particularly when I had my daughter. I wanted to clearly put a line between my professional and private life,” she told me.
Years later, she's not sure how to get back into it. When I told her I was on BlueSky, she replied, “I don't even know what that is.” But if you meet her in person, Beley doesn't conceal her voice acting past. Though her daughter hasn't watched any of these now-vintage anime, her students at the Shakespeare Theatre Company often recognize her.
“A lot of my students who are in their 20s get a little fangirl on me sometimes when they find out. They're the ones who have let me know how big Gundam Wing has become. They even bring in toys sometimes—the Gundams they've built.”
Beley said there was never any indication that Gundam Wing would take on the life it has today. While some of the shows she worked on, like Exosquad, were big-budget productions, her role as Relena wasn't anything out of the norm. As usual, she recorded her part in the studio alone, guessing at how the actors for Heero, Zechs, or Dorothy were reacting to her lines.
In advance of our meeting, she listened to her lines and thought there was stuff she could do better, she told me with a theatrical wince. But though she voiced Relena at an earlier period in her career, Beley was by then already a trained actor with a background in Shakespeare.
Naturally, when I heard this, I wanted to hear if Beley saw any connection between Gundam Wing and one of Shakespeare's plays. After all, both mediums combine high-level conflict with interpersonal drama; both highbrow and lowbrow themes; grand opera and soap opera. Take just Relena's arc. On the one hand, it's the low-stakes drama of a girl falling in love with an unavailable boy. On the other hand, it's about that same girl founding her own nation.
“I think [both Gundam Wing and Shakespeare] venture into many different layers,” she said. “It's universal. There are big picture themes running through, and then there's also the individual: their wants and desires and fears. And so much of how we function comes from our desires and from our fears. So I think they are both rooted in those basic 400-year-old stories.”
“I thought [Relena] was annoying at the beginning, I have to admit,” Beley told me.
Filming Relena's scenes out of order, as was par for the course for an Ocean Productions dub, Beley said she had to trust what the authors meant, even if her lines didn't seem to make sense.
“That was challenging sometimes, because [Relena] would say things and I'd be like, 'Huh? What is she saying?' Like at the very beginning of the show, when she was responding to her father. And I was like, 'Why are you obsessing over this boy?'”
As she continued recording, however, she gained more affection for Relena. And now that Beley has a teenage daughter of her own, she can reframe some of Relena's brattier exhortations as, if not totally justified, certainly more familiar.
“You grow to love these characters. You really do,” Beley told me.
I did know, I told Beley. On my subsequent Gundam Wing viewings as an adult, I gained a new softness for this character I was once so hard-hearted towards. Where I thought she was pushy, she was resilient. Where I once thought she was naive, I realized she was brave for insisting that a better world was possible than the one she had been handed.
Looking at Relena's place within the Gundam multiverse, I can see more clearly where she fits among the series' female characters. Relena is a direct offshoot of Sayla Mass nee Artesia Som Deikun, 1979's Mobile Suit Gundam heroine who was also born to an affluent (but doomed) politician, and also cursed with a brother who insists on being a masked supervillain. Later on, Relena would serve to inspire later heroines. One of the most obvious is blonde politician's daughter Kudelia Aina Bernstein from 2015's Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans.
This fall, Relena is returning to US screens as the franchise celebrates the 30th anniversary of Gundam Wing with new showings of Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz. Beley does not earn royalties, so she wasn't aware of the event. Still, she said she'd be interested in voicing Relena again if the franchise opts to do a new project for the 30th anniversary. Though she didn't start as the character's biggest fan (and I completely relate to that), she'd love to step into her shoes again after all this time.
“Maybe she has an annoying idealism at times,” said Beley. “But she shows us that hope is possible. Somebody just has to hold onto it.”
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