“The announcement trailer for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare revealed that Kevin Spacey (House of Cards) will play the game’s main antagonist, complete with dead-eyed motion capture but without Frank Underwood’s southern drawl.” — Warren Zhang
The announcement trailer for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare revealed that Kevin Spacey (House of Cards) will play the game’s main antagonist, complete with dead-eyed motion capture but without Frank Underwood’s southern drawl.
The casting decision is one of the more high profile celebrity additions to a video game cast, but Spacey is hardly the first Hollywood actor to leap into a video game. Here are the three of the best celebrity performances in a video game.
3. Ellen Page in Beyond: Two Souls
If nothing else, Ellen Page’s (The East) performance in Beyond: Two Souls is certainly the most lifelike performance ever rendered by a video game. Though the work on her co-stars (including Willem Dafoe, of Nymphomaniac) lands squarely in the uncanny valley, game developers Quantic Dream manage to capture Page with an eerie degree of accuracy. Page’s performance is stifled by an appalling script, but she demonstrates an impressive commitment to the role of Jodie. She gamely follows all of the script’s ludicrous twists and turns — including Native American ghosts and a spectral T-Rex, among other things — without skipping a beat.
2. Gary Oldman, Call of Duty: World at War and Call of Duty: Black Ops
Gary Oldman has had an impressive career as an actor, and his work in the Treyarch Call of Duty titles makes for a surprisingly sturdy addition to his resume. Though he didn’t do any motion capture work for these games, Oldman still makes his presence felt as the grizzled Russian Capt. Viktor Reznov. As Reznov, Oldman manages to bring a loose bit of coherence to these games and their sprawling, bloated narratives. He’s not given much range outside of Russian hard-ass and beleaguered Russian hard-ass, but he plays the role with aplomb and clear relish.
1. The casts of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Back on the PS2 and Xbox, Rockstar used to assemble star studded voice casts for their open world crime games. In Vice City, we get the likes of William Fichtner (Elysium), Dennis Hopper (Alpha and Omega), Ray Liotta (Muppets Most Wanted) and Burt Reynolds (Category 5). In San Andreas, we get Samuel L. Jackson (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) as the game’s primary antagonist. Much of Grand Theft Auto is indebted to cinema, and Rockstar has largely cast its actors to play roles comfortably within their wheelhouses. So, Liotta voices the main character of Vice City as a loose riff on Goodfellas’ Henry Hill, while Jackson’s character in San Andreas plays like an amalgamation of every Samuel L. Jackson character ever.
The star studded voice cast added to the cinematic qualities of Grand Theft Auto, back when its polygonal spins on Miami and California required a lot of suspension of disbelief. Even though you knew you weren’t watching a movie, you could close your eyes and pretend you were.
