Celebs powering up video games
Actors move beyond film to digitized performances
LOS ANGELES— Celebrity sightings have never been a rarity at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, North America’s biggest gaming conference.
This is L.A. after all. But this year, we can expect more sightings than usual at E3.
You can thank Drake for that. Back in March, Toronto’s own 6ix God joined rapper Travis Scott, NFL wide receiver JuJu Smith- Schuster and Tyler “Ninja” Blevins — an incredibly popular Fortnite player — to play the game as a team. Their gameplay on Twitch.tv went viral and had huge viewership on the streaming site.
The result? Epic Games is hosting a “Fortnite Pro Am” event here on Tuesday, featuring 50 pro gamers/streamers and 50 celebrities in a tournament with $3 million in prizes, with all proceeds going to charity.
The list of celebrities includes the likes of NBA star Paul George, actor Joel McHale and Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz. But Blevins is likely the guy at E3 who couldn’t walk the trade show floor without being mobbed; his own celebrity outshines them all.
Beyond that event, the E3 Coliseumis hosting a set of panels featuring a number of creators discussing their work, including director Darren Aronofsky, Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy,
Avengers: Infinity War director Joe Russo and several highprofile game-makers.
These panels show just how much the lines have blurred between the special effects you see on a movie screen and those you see on a gaming console. And actors are no longer simply lending their voices to titles, but their faces also.
“The big triple-A games, they do try to make it as cinematic as possible with performance capture,” says Elias Toufexis, a Canadian actor who has a long list of screen and video game credits.
Toufexis has been called the “Canadian Andy Serkis,” and while he started out doing voice work, the higher-profile games now mostly use motion or performance capture, where actors’ faces and body movements are captured and then digitized into games.
In some games, they are more recognizable than others, such as the recent release of Detroit
Becomes Human on PS4, which stars well-known actors Jesse Williams and Lance Henriksen, among others. That developer, Quantic Dreams, previously worked with Ellen Page for its earlier title, Beyond Two Souls.
Toufexis has noticed that casting for bigger games is now done with known casting directors and actors reading for scenes at auditions, just as you would for any show or film. But there’s one big difference — game actors need to check their egos at the door.
“In film and TV, if you get a role, the first thing they want you to do is talk about it. They want you to promote it,” Toufexis says. “But in the video game world for the most part, they don’t want you to talk about it. You just get enveloped into a team and you are on the same level as a developer or animator, or you come in and you don’t talk about it. You do your job and you go home.”
Toufexis finds this amusing because although he has done a ton of TV work, including shows like The Expanse, he’s much better known for his gaming work and has a cult following, mostly for being Adam Jensen in the Deus Ex games.
“I’ve been working on games for four years that are just about to be announced at this E3, and nobody knows I’ve been working on them,” he laments. “And I’m playing major characters, but I can’t say anything!”
That’s because games companies have strict marketing plans, and there is much cloak and dagger to keep things under wraps. I reached out to some Canadian communications people about potential celebrity appearances during the convention, and they were sworn to secrecy.
But one made an interesting point about how developers are becoming celebs in their own right.
“Some of our own developers now have huge social media followings, so why bother to pay for a celebrity’s appearance fee?” said the communication person.
E3 has always been the place where developers and programmer can ascend to rock star status, with people like Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima, creator of MetalGear Solid , being feted everywhere they go.
“The big triple-A games, they do try to make it as cinematic as possible with performance capture.”
ELIAS TOUFEXIS ACTOR