Imogen Hartley is a created performer — a designed face and a synthetic voice of record, with no real person behind the actor. Hartley is the name the studio bills her under: by the director's ruling, the studio's created performers carry invented real-world names of their own, never their characters' names.

In the studio's fiction, Hartley is an English actress who came up through regional theatre and a long-running costume serial before Somnium Machina cast her as Princess Zelda — the biography is invented whole, part of the persona the credits present. Her voice, Aria, was locked by the director's ear on 20 October 2026 after three other voices (Nova, Melody, and Paloma) were tried and struck the same day; that question is closed.

Zelda also holds the film's ending in her hands: it is she who sets up Link's single spoken line, delivering the setup in the very last clip or two of the film, shortly before his wish on the Triforce and his last word.