“Things got pretty heated, and I was thinking, ‘OK, are we in trouble?'”
The Far Cry series has been well-known for its complex and interesting villains, generally strengthened by top-of-the-line voice acting from actors like Michael Mando (Vas) and Troy Baker (Pagan Min). It’s no surprise that fans are anticipating Far Cry 5 not only for its open-ended gameplay but for Joseph Seed, the game’s main antagonist.
Greg Bryk, who voices Seed in the game, seems to be doing another bang-up job (at least according to the trailers and the live-action short film) but it almost didn’t turn out that way. Thanks to some new info from GameSpot, finding a voice actor for Joseph Seed proved to be quite the challenge and that the decision to use Bryk came very late in development.
Dan Hay, the game’s executive producer, said:Â “We took a long time to find him. To be honest, it was a little bit scary because it went around in circles for a while. Everything hinges on finding the right guy,” he said.
“We were doing all this work and building all these characters, and we … felt good about all these different characters. But we still hadn’t found the Father,” Hay explained. “We had good writing and everybody was feeling good about it. Things got pretty heated, and I was thinking, ‘OK, are we in trouble?’ Meanwhile, I’m trying to put on a brave face.”
That all changed about midway through development when Hay saw Byrk’s audition tape. The team was feeling the stress of being unable to lock anyone down for the role, so it was a huge relief for Hay to see a performance that perfectly captured exactly what they were looking for.
“After about a minute, he finished his monologue, which didn’t feel like a monologue, it almost felt like a love letter,” he added. “And I was just like, ‘This is the guy.’ We all think we’re pretty smart and we think that it’s hard to allow somebody to swim in our minds and take us away from our lives and go into theirs. I really had a hard time believing that someone was going to be able to convey that to me–to join their cult. He didn’t do that. He didn’t try. What he simply tried to do was challenge my assumptions that everything is OK. As soon as I believed that his opinion that everything was not okay and that it might be prudent to be prepared for the 1 percent chance that it wasn’t going to be OK. I was like, ‘OK, that sounds reasonable.'”
We’re glad it all worked out for the team and we can’t wait to see the full breadth of Greg Byrk’s performance in Far Cry 5 when it launches next week for Xbox One, PS4, and PC on March 27th.
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