Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Zelda's voice actor shares her inspiration for the role

A portion of a GameRant interview with Patricia Summersett, the voice actor for Zelda...

GR: Where did you draw your inspiration from when auditioning for the role of Zelda?

PS: “Well, when I auditioned for the role I didn’t know what I was auditioning for, so I was more going with the themes of the kind of cadence that they were looking for. You know, an interpretation of. When I first came in with my initial ideas. I had a feeling it was a princess, she was younger but had the weight of the world on her shoulders, and had a kind of timeless/ageless quality where age was not necessarily equivalent to the age on paper. And, yeah, that she had a sort of regal sense to her. That’s kind of what I picked up from the breakdown of it. So, that’s what I initially went with. Once I found out that I got the part, which was quite further down in the process, we started recording. I think a lot of the decision have been made about what the direction would be anyway, so it was a negotiation between, I guess, my sensibilities and that of Nintendo’s vision.”

from GoNintendo