After more than five years in development, Red Dead Redemption 2 was finally unleashed into the world in October of 2018 and considered a raging success by critics and fans alike. While the standard gameplay elements of the game were obviously great, the performances delivered by its actors were particularly outstanding.
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We spoke with three actors from the cast about their experiences in such a project, its challenges, and generally what it’s like working on something so massive for such a long period of time.
“The production of a video game does take a lot longer than a movie or TV show, and I enjoyed the extra amount of time we shared for a multitude of reasons,” Rob Wiethoff (John Marston) told PEDESTRIAN.TV via email. “The first thing that comes to mind is the fact that it allowed for each actor to get familiar and comfortable with their character. When an actor has confidence in the role, great things can happen.”
These days, both the physical performance and voice capture are done in one go, which makes for a far more realistic end result. But after acting out thousands of scenes over years of work, I was particularly interested in what each actor’s favourite line was.
For Roger Clark, who played Arthur Morgan – the main character in Red Dead Redemption 2 – it was a line spoken to John Marston towards the beginning of the game that stuck with him.
“Arthur knows the time of the outlaw is passing and the fact that other people don’t realize that is a huge source of conflict within the story of the game, I feel,” he said.
“It’s an integral part of it. So working with Rob, whom I was a huge fan of having played and loved the previous Red Dead, I felt a little weird adopting a sort of big brother, mentor relationship with him. He was a total gentleman about it though as usual and put me at ease real fast.”
Clark says he particularly like it because it’s “a really poetic, economic and ‘Western’ way of describing one of the vital themes of the game for me.”
The line itself is: “Listen, I was the prize pony once but I’m here to tell you, this life, this way, well, we’re the last I reckon, and we ain’t long for it.”
For Sadie Adler actor, Alex McKenna, it’s short and sweet, yet also beautifully poetic: “You and me, we’re more ghosts than people.”
But my favourite of all of these comes from Wiethoff, who opted for something a little wackier. His favourite line is simply: “Have you seen my squirrel?” Classic stuff.
Clark, McKenna, and Wiethoff filled me in on a lot more of what life is like working on a video game, so keep an eye out for more from them soon.
