“Had I been brought into the public knowledge a little bit before the game came out, I can only begin to think how that may have affected my performance,” Clark explains. Clark was going to have to fill the enormous cowboy boots of John Marston actor Rob Wiethoff. This raises an intriguing point: Arthur Morgan is not the protagonist of the inaugural Red Dead Redemption game. Despite having to keep his role hush hush, he was at home replaying Red Dead Redemption, which he had coincidentally rolled credits on around a month prior to auditioning. I think that lended us a focus that we might not have had if we were working in a much more public environment.Įvidently, Clark was not full of shit. But it can also be very helpful, because we were working very much in a tunnel atmosphere and we had the horse’s blinkers on. Sometimes you get nervous about social media, especially if rumours are starting to point in your direction. “You get paranoid if it's something that's really anticipated like Red Dead. “It's hard, especially in the long-term, if you're working on a very long project not being able to talk about it with anyone,” Clark says. In fact, for a game with NDAs as strict as this one, being able to work in a more contained environment also had its benefits. Rockstar always answered all questions I had to the best of their knowledge and I was very grateful for that.”įor clarity, Clark is speaking to industry practices at large here, and does not think these issues apply to his own experience with Red Dead Redemption 2. Of course, the other side of the coin is that actors regularly make blunders on social media, myself included, so all of these secretive measures to ensure confidentiality are often necessary. I think it demonstrates a lack of trust, and if you don't trust each other, you're not going to come up with your best work. But when I hear of other studios not disclosing major components to their performers, it makes me sad. The performers need to know what they're doing and why they're doing it to come up with a more accurate, truthful performance. I understand there's a need to be competitive and for NDAs and whatnot, but if you barely trust the talent with the big narrative picture, maybe you need to reassess the way you’re telling stories. Scripts are often a lot more fluid with gaming than they are in other mediums because the cost of reshooting or adding things down the road isn’t as significant as it is on, for example, a film set. Sometimes those things simply haven’t been conceived or confirmed from on high yet. It’s a bit of a tricky one - how much do you want to keep your talent in the dark? And when does that start to infringe on their performance? It’s also worth mentioning though that a lot of the time the studios are not purposefully withholding important plot and character points from the actor. “We would always ask for it as soon in advance as possible, and maybe about a year or two in, I realised sometimes they don't write it until ten or 15 minutes before you show up. “I can tell that was definitely intentional on their part, especially for some of the dialogue,” Clark tells me. Related: Red Dead Online Is Better With Friends On top of its famous secrecy, Rockstar clearly wanted to see how fast the actors could learn lines. There were no sides - sections of a script that actors must learn prior to an audition - provided in advance, either. Aside from being informed it was going to be performance capture for a video game, all he was told to do was show up wearing a pair of cowboy boots. Clark was not told a whole lot about what he was auditioning for when he first applied for the role. It seems apt, then, to start exactly there: day one. On top of NDAs spanning half a decade, following in the bootprints of the feared and revered John Marston, and delivering a sincere and multifaceted performance centered around the power of fragility, it’s safe to say Arthur actor Roger Clark had his work cut out for him from literally day one. However, spearheading a game - nay, a phenomenon - as sprawling and ubiquitous as Red Dead Redemption 2 is no easy feat. Ever since moseying onto the world stage in October 2018, gunslinger extraordinaire Arthur Morgan has carved his name into cultural memory like a tomahawk through a skull.
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