By Uncharted 3 there were just two chairs and a steering wheel because you don't need anything but where we're going to sit. So it got paired down. It was great for me to be able to do that with a jeep and understand but then see how it can be paired down. New actors would come in to work with us and be like "So... these chairs are a jeep?".
Do you ever get to do any of the stunts?
They won't let me do the big stunts. For the first couple of games I wanted to but I realised that there are jobs for people who are special at their jobs, and stunt people are those people. We have a guy I just worked with, Reuben Langdon, who covered me on a lot of that stuff, he was the guy that did all the Drake hanging out of the airplane. And they had him on a wire holding onto a bar, and someone was pulling a wire that was attached to him that would lift his legs up, in a pulley system, and another that would pull him side to side. He was literally just holding on with his hands all day long, and with these Popeye forearms.
As much as I would have liked to do that, I think the only think I've ever done stunt wise was jump from a truck to a truck, which is literally just jumping off and grabbing onto a bar and hanging on. Which is the coolest thing I'll ever do.
And what's the silliest you've ever felt on set?
When don't I feel silly in a motion capture scene? [laughs] It's not the most flattering thing. The silliest, off the top of my head, was Uncharted 3 on the horses because it was just a block again with a saddle, but you couldn't move. We did a first test where you had to bounce like you're on a horse and then the programmer said "no, no, no" - again, the geniuses had figured out a way to make my body move the way the horse moved.
But the first few tests, there I am bouncing and bouncing, and famously I had to do one full minute of that movement and they started pumping the My Little Pony music as loud as they could through the studio, but I couldn't stop. They weren't capturing my face at the time so I was just laughing and cursing them out, but pretending to ride a fake horse in front of a group of people in a motion capture suit. That's a topper.
In some games you've provided more than one voice. How do you decide which is right for each character?
My favourite way is that they bring animation of the character that they're looking to do. You sit with the director and producers and talk about what they're looking for, and the sky's the limit. It's one of my favourite things because if you handed me a character we could kind of get together and [starts doing voices]. And you play with the range.
Sometimes my favourite thing to do is draw on the opposites so if it looks like a big burly guy, give him a voice [raises pitch] like up here. I call it the David Beckham effect - brilliantly handsome, but you just don't expect his voice to be as falsetto as it is.
How did you approach overwriting Peter Dinklage's lines in Destiny, as Ghost?
We went in with the producers and all the people at bungie and they said "we're looking for something different, we want X, Y and Z" and we actually did a full four hour session just auditioning the different voices like "well what about this" and "what about this" until we found a nice comfortable place they liked. The most difficult thing about that re-recording was that the original material, in my opinion, wasn't written as strongly as the newer stuff. And some of the lines that Peter had to say, they're really hard to make them work.
