Rebecca Chambers

This article is about the Resident Evil character. For other uses, see Rebecca Chambers (disambiguation).

Rebecca Chambers
Resident Evil character
Rebecca Chambers in Resident Evil Zero
First appearance	Resident Evil (1996)
Created by	Shinji Mikami Isao Ohishi
Designed by	Isao Ohishi
Voiced by	English Lynn Hariss (Resident Evil) Hope Levy (Resident Evil remake) Stephanie Sheh (The Umbrella Chronicles, Resident Evil 5, The Mercenaries 3D) Erin Cahill (Vendetta, Death Island) Megan Orvold-Scheider (Dead by Daylight) Japanese Ami Koshimizu (Resident Evil HD Remaster, Resident Evil Zero HD Remaster, Vendetta, Death Island)

Rebecca Chambers (Japanese: レベッカ・チェンバース, Hepburn: Rebekka Chenbāsu) is a character in the Resident Evil survival horror video game series created by the Japanese company Capcom. She was first introduced as a supporting character in the original Resident Evil (1996) and became a player character of the prequel game Resident Evil Zero (2002). In the first Resident Evil, Rebecca is a young officer with the Raccoon Police Department's Special Tactics And Rescue Service (S.T.A.R.S.) unit and is trapped in a zombie-infested mansion.

Rebecca also appears in several Resident Evil games, novelizations, CG animated films and other game franchises, including Dead by Daylight (2016). Several actresses have portrayed Rebecca, including American actress Erin Cahill in the animated sequels, Resident Evil: Vendetta (2017) and Resident Evil: Death Island (2023).

Rebecca has received mostly positive reviews from video game publications, with some critics praising her for being a formidable female character who does not conform to stereotypical gender norms.

Concept and design

She was created by director Shinji Mikami and designer Isao Ohishi. Her standard outfit is rather androgynous, Rebecca's alternate costumes in the games "expose her midriff and voluptuous shape". Her character design was created after the game was first developed for the Nintendo 64. Her design was also adjusted when she lost her beret and shoulder pads. While Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine seem to have been in the Resident Evil cast from the start, Rebecca and Barry Burton were not. In the prototype's story, either Rebecca or Billy could die with the other character surviving and completing the game. This idea was scrapped as Rebecca dying would ruin the canon of the Resident Evil timeline.

Mikami said in 2014: "If I had to name the woman character I most disliked in my games it would be Rebecca Chambers. She’s submissive, she’s not independent. I didn’t want to include her but the staff wanted that kind of character in the game, for whatever reason. I’m sure it made sense to them. And in Japan, that character is pretty popular." In the remake of RE0, Rebecca's has pre-order bonuses, including a nurse costume for her.

After a lengthy absence from the media franchise, Rebecca was returned to a major role in the 2017 animated film Resident Evil: Vendetta. Producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi said that the production team wanted to use a female character who had not appeared in the preceding animated films. Jill Valentine was originally considered for the role, but her intervening history was regarded as difficult to accommodate, which led the filmmakers to choose Rebecca and develop her earlier stage-play portrayal as a university professor.

Portrayal

In the original Resident Evil (1996), Rebecca is portrayed in the game's live-action cut-scenes by an unknown actress simply credited as "Linda". Rebecca's voice actress in the original game is Lynn Harris. Philip J. Reed reported that fellow cast members Dean Harrington and Barry Gjerde also identified Harris as the uncredited director of the English-language voice cast.

In the 2002 title Resident Evil, she was voiced by English actress Hope Levy, and Ami Koshimizu in Japanese. In Resident Evil 0, she was modeled by Ayumi Hamasaki. In Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles (2007), Resident Evil 5: Gold Edition (2009) and Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D (2011), she was voiced by Stephanie Sheh. Megan Orvid-Scheider voiced her in Dead by Daylight (2016). In Resident Evil: Vendetta and Resident Evil: Death Island (2023), she was voiced by English actress Erin Cahill and Japanese actress Ami Koshimizu.

For the Japanese versions of the high-definition remasters, Ami Koshimizu characterised Rebecca as a scientifically minded rookie who attempts to appear more confident than she feels. Koshimizu added breaths and emotional reactions that were absent from the English track, reasoning that Rebecca's responses to the creatures should reflect those of the player. During recording, the developers asked her to portray Rebecca as initially more guarded towards Billy Coen, as her first performance suggested that Rebecca trusted him too quickly.

Appearances

In the Resident Evil series

Rebecca Chambers makes her first appearance in the original 1996 Resident Evil as a supporting character for Chris Redfield, a fellow officer in the U.S. special police force Special Tactics And Rescue Service (S.T.A.R.S.). She is an 18-year-old rookie member of the unit's Bravo Team and serves as a field medic additionally in charge of rear security. Before she joined the force, she was a child prodigy and graduated from college at only 18 years old. Rebecca arrives at the Arklay Research Facility to investigate a series of cannibalistic murders with her comrades lost and scattered across the Arklay Mountains. Her introduction and other appearances throughout the first game vary depending on the path the player chooses and she can be controlled during portions of the story. She may die an off-screen death as well. Canonically, Rebecca is ultimately rescued by Chris and the Alpha Team and she emerges as Bravo Team's sole survivor of the incident in the canon version of the story.

In Resident Evil Zero, a prequel to Resident Evil, Rebecca is one of two protagonists. Shortly after Bravo Team had been dispatched to the Arklay Mountains to investigate the murders, she enters a seemingly abandoned train. Coming under attack by zombies and mutated animals, Rebecca encounters escaped death-row military prisoner Billy Coen and cooperates with him. The two discover that the viral zombie outbreak has been masterminded by James Marcus who had been one of the Umbrella Corporation's top scientists but was assassinated on behalf of the company, only to be revived by the monsters created by him. Rebecca and Billy escape from the train and find themselves in an old underground facility of Umbrella Corporation that was overtaken by Marcus in his lust for revenge. In the end, they manage to destroy both Marcus and the facility. Rebecca allows Billy to escape, falsely reporting his death to the authorities.

Rebecca appears in Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles which summarizes the events of Resident Evil Zero and details her later experiences leading up to Resident Evil. The game pairs her with fellow STARS Bravo team member Richard Aiken as they work together to fend off hordes of undead creatures.

She has survived the events of Resident Evil 2 (1998), in which the character makes an easter egg type cameo appearance in an undeveloped film on Wesker's desk. Rebecca is also a playable character in Resident Evil 5: Gold Edition in its minigame mode Mercenaries Reunion, as well as an unlockable character in Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D. She also appears in Resident Evil mobile game Resident Evil Survival Unit (2025).

Other appearances and media

An animated film starring Rebecca was released in 2017, titled Resident Evil: Vendetta. In the film, Rebecca, long retired as a police officer, now works in university as a professor, using her knowledge of medicine to develop possible cures for viruses. When her laboratory is attacked by bio-terrorists, Rebecca is exposed to the new A-virus but uses her newly researched vaccine to save herself. She also appears in the sequel, Resident Evil: Death Island. Rebecca's youthful appearance in the film was said to be a result of the A-virus slowing her aging.

Rebecca plays a central role in S. D. Perry's Resident Evil novels published between 1998 and 2004, particularly the original stories Resident Evil: Caliban Cove and Resident Evil: Underworld, and the novelizations of the games in which she appears (Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy and Resident Evil: Zero Hour). In printed trading card media, she appears as a card in the Bandai produced game Resident Evil: The Deck Building Game. In 2012, Capcom's themed restaurant "Biohazard Cafe & Grill S.T.A.R.S." featured an undescribed "Rebecca-Style Dessert" on their menu. In the 2015 Japan-exclusive stage play Biohazard: The Stage, Rebecca is a professor at a Western Australia university that becomes the scene of a bioterrorism incident, which reunites her with Chris Redfield as they once again work together. She was portrayed by Rin Asuka.

She appears as a cameo in Tom Clancy's The Division 2 (2019). In 2022, Rebecca was added as a playable character in the asymmetrical survival horror game Dead by Daylight.

Critical reception

Rebecca has received mostly positive reception. Some video game journalists, such as PlayStation Official Magazine, felt that "her starring role in Resident Evil Zero made her a fan favourite." The Mexican magazine edition of Club Nintendo similarly described Rebecca as a character beloved by Resident Evil fans, and linked her popularity, together with the opportunity to depict events preceding the Spencer Mansion incident, to Capcom's development of Resident Evil Zero.

In a 2003 feature about women in video games, Edge grouped Rebecca with Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield and other survival-horror heroines as examples of practical and resourceful female characters who were attractive without being overtly designed for sexual display. The magazine contrasted their portrayal with both more sexualised video-game women and the passive treatment of women it associated with horror films. Andrew Clouther of GameZone described Rebecca as a badass females in the Resident Evil franchise, he said that "Her first mission involved zombies, trains and mansions. While timid around her fellow S.T.A.R.S. members, she proves to be skilled in both combat and medical assistance." In 2017, Inverse's Jessica Famularo has claimed that Rebecca is one of the best Resident Evil character, stating that "Rebecca may seem vulnerable, but she’s actually a fiercely loyal companion and capable field medic. Folks love her for her soft, gentle personality — it’s certainly a pleasant contrast to the chaos going on in the world around her."

Brittany Vincent of Syfy Wire considered Rebecca underused in comparison with Jill Valentine and Claire Redfield. Vincent observed that the original game presents her as a frightened rookie, while Resident Evil Zero retrospectively reveals that she had already survived an outbreak at Umbrella's training facility before reaching Spencer Mansion. She argued that Rebecca's survival of both incidents, scientific education and medical assistance to other S.T.A.R.S. members made her potentially one of the unit's toughest members despite her youth and lack of military experience. Brendan Caldwell of Rock Paper Shotgun also noted that Rebecca was a minor NPC who became a major character. Despite saying that "Resident Evil characters have a hard time retaining a personality as it is, she was seen as interesting enough by the developers to make her the co-protagonist of Resident Evil 0."

Reed described Harris' as Rebecca performance in the original Resident Evil to be fluctuating between childlike and adult-sounding delivery, as well as between calmness and manic. He suggested that Rebecca was less widely remembered than Barry Burton because most players favoured Jill Valentine's scenario, while Rebecca principally served as Chris Redfield's companion Reed observed that Rebecca's scientific abilities are expressed through gameplay. In Chris's scenario, the player controls her to prepare the V-JOLT herbicide and to retrieve serum for the poisoned Richard Aiken, tasks that Chris is unable to perform himself. Reed added that Rebecca makes things a little clearer for Chris, and thought that Chris frequently depends on Rebecca to help him progress and save him from danger.

Rebecca also received some negative reactions from reviewers. A Resident Evil designer, Shinji Mikami said that Rebecca is one of his least favorite female character in the series, he said that "she's submissive and not independent". In Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian criticized Rebecca's alternate costumes as overly sexualized, particularly the nurse and cheerleader costumes. One of the essays in Nadine Farghaly's Unraveling Resident Evil also criticized and compared Rebecca to a "typical trope" of "a virgin or tomboy".

Bibliography

• Reed, Philip J. (2020). Resident Evil. Boss Fight Books. ISBN 978-1-940535-25-8.
• Platz, Jenny (2014). Farghaly, Nadine (ed.). Unraveling Resident Evil: Essays on the Complex Universe of the Games and Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-1476614403. Retrieved September 1, 2017.