Helldivers 2’s gleefully unsubtle satire of American jingoism begins mere moments after you launch the game, as the community-named John Helldiver’s squeaky-clean suburban life is torn apart in front of him by a giant insect. “You could be next,” he warns. “That is, unless you make the most important decision of your life.”
Millions of players answered the Super-Earth Spokesperson’s call to spread Managed Democracy throughout the galaxy, and to celebrate the game’s two-year anniversary, Arrowhead has released a “Dev Tales” video that explains how voice and motion capture actor Craig Lee Thomas was cast in the role.
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Russ Nickel, the game’s former lead writer, explains in the video how the cinematic came about: “The script went off sort of into the abyss and I didn’t hear anything for awhile, and then I found out it was gonna shoot in a week.” The animation studio behind the cinematic, Goodbye Kansas, planned to use an actor based in Sweden for the role—”perfectly good,” by Nickel’s estimation, but for John Helldiver, they needed “to get the funniest person we can possibly find.”
The studio was fine with that, granted they could find someone in seven days. Nickel scrambled to call “everyone in LA who I’d ever met who I knew had worked in casting.”
Thomas recalled in the video how fast it all happened, from self-tape to motion capture. “I was like, ‘Jesus, they are moving fucking quick on this!’ And the next day they were like, ‘You have a passport, right?'”
The rest is history, and Thomas reckons he’s particularly well-suited to the role. “The sort of performative, jingoistic, ‘Hey, I’m the cheesiest, most insincere,’ that thing, is something that I always have fun doing. I know it’s something that I sort of walk into just with the way I look. I describe it as, like, this is my part to lose,” he explained in the video.
You can learn more behind-the-scenes tidbits in the full video, which the description states will “kick off a month of anniversary surprises.”
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