Yuri Lowenthal hated his voice. “I sounded like a little kid,” he tells USA Today. “And I didn’t want to sound like a little kid, you know? I wanted to sound like a big, manly man.”
Born in 1971, Lowenthal isn’t exactly a child, but he doesn’t sound like your stereotypically gruff video game character. In his own words, he’s “more of a Robin than a Batman”, though he’d love a chance at playing the Dark Knight. Being the adaptable actor he is, I’d like to see it happen, too.
As we’re talking, my children, who have realized I’m talking to the guy who plays PlayStation’s version of Spider-Man, burst into my office. Rather than instantly turning me into a meme, Lowenthal doesn’t miss a beat, speaking to them in character as Peter Parker before switching to his dudebro voice as Bugsnax’s Chandlo Funkbun. “I’m getting swole with your dad,” he tells them, bestowing me the gift of the official title: Coolest Father of the Year.
He might have hated it while growing up, but his voice is a gift. It’s a voice that’s opened up doors for Lowenthal, allowing him to portray a wide range of characters that a middle-aged actor wouldn’t be able to play in traditional media. Looking back now, he wouldn’t change a thing.
In 2003’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, players take control of an acrobatic royal who wields a dagger that can control the flow of time. Whether wall-running, swinging across chasms, or fighting monsters, the Prince can undo his mistakes by activating the dagger, which rewinds time, transporting him back to safety.
When Lowenthal first stepped into the Prince’s shoes, the game industry was in a very different place. The Sands of Time was an anomaly because both he and his scene partner, Joanna Wasick (Farah), recorded their lines in the same booth, reacting to each other. Back then, video game actors would generally deliver their lines in isolation, with the conversations spliced together after the fact.
These days, performance capture is the preferred method used by most big video game studios. Using motion capture suits, all the actors get together with stunt performers, and they film scenes from start to finish, sometimes with ensemble casts. For the upcoming Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake, Lowenthal had the opportunity to activate the dagger of time and cause a paradox by stepping both backward and forwards through time simultaneously. While being together in the same booth for the original game made Lowenthal’s and Wasick’s chemistry feel more natural, advances in technology will hopefully take that to the next level when the remake lands in 2022.
“It was one of the greatest honors of my life to return to a role that I had loved so much and thought was in the rearview mirror for me,” Lowenthal explains. “For them to want to do the remake 15 years later and to come to me and not some younger, hotter actor was truly an honor.
“When we did the first The Sands of Time, I may have done three to five recording sessions for the whole game, and that was my contribution. This time I got to literally step into the shoes again. I got to rewind time and see if I could do it better. I honestly couldn’t say enough good [things] about the experience. I love the new director, we got to keep all of Jordan Mechner’s brilliant writing and then and then redo the game better. I can’t wait for people to finally get a chance to play it. I know it’s been tough in the post-production, but I’m really excited.”
Shortly after the first Sands of Time launched, Wasick left acting. “I hope it wasn’t my fault,” Lowenthal jokes. For the remake, he’s joined instead by Supinder Wraich, who is playing the role of Princess Farah.
“We got to work together the entire time for recording as well as for the performance capture,” Lowenthal says. “And then add a whole other cast of actors that I got to work with in the room like we were doing a play or shooting a movie. I think [it] brought something special [to the remake] and I hope it comes through.”
Lowenthal’s voice work might be as prevalent as Amazon Alexa’s – his IMDb page is like scrolling through a PDF of War & Peace, filled with credits for cartoons, video games, TV, and anime – but he’s no stranger to performance capture either. His most prestigious role is as Peter Parker in Marvel’s Spider-Man and Miles Morales for PS4/PS5, which required him to strap on a skin-tight mocap suit and pretend it’s a cool superhero costume.
The actor says the audition started before the idea for the game even gestated – before he or Insomniac even knew they were making a Spider-Man game. Prior to Spider-Man, Insomniac made an Xbox One game called Sunset Overdrive, in which Lowenthal played the male main character. In that game, players jump, grind, and flip around a cartoon environment. It’s as if Insomniac was auditioning for its shot at a Webslinger game just by creating it.
When it finally came time for Insomniac to pitch its take on Spider-Man, the studio asked Lowenthal to come in to help the developer with its own audition. Lowenthal played Peter Parker alongside Bryan Bloom (Wolfenstein: The New Order), who played Norman Osborn for the audition tape. Bloom would later take the role of Taskmaster in the actual game because this wasn’t an audition for the actors to get parts – it was Insomniac’s own audition to Sony in an attempt to get its game greenlit.
“They’ve written a scene, we recorded it, and that was their audition,” Lowenthal says. “And then I didn’t hear about it until again until whenever they were doing auditions for the Spider-Man game. I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is the thing that they were doing. This is what they were auditioning for.’ Because it had to have been at least a year after we did that first thing.”
From there, it was like any other audition. Lowenthal came in, did some work in the booth, did some more on the performance capture volume, and Insomniac started whittling the prospective actors down.
“I love working with Insomniac,” Lowenthal says. “I tried not to be nervous about it. But I was nervous about it because I wanted it. And I had just cut my hair. I just got a mohawk. So I came in with this ridiculous haircut. Not ridiculous. I mean, it’s [expletive] awesome, let’s be honest, but not exactly the Peter Parker do – unless you’re talking Spider-Punk. But I was also worried that they wouldn’t be able to see the character past the hair. Thankfully, they did.”
Lowenthal doesn’t just suit the role because of his youthful tone (his natural voice is almost 1:1 with Peter Parker’s in-game). He suits this specific iteration of the character well because of his life experiences. Insomniac didn’t just want to do another Spider-Man origin story – the hero here has been web-swinging around New York for years when we meet him. He’s still dorky, but there’s wisdom and experience under the mask. It comes through in Lowenthal’s performance – a performance that almost didn’t happen.
“As I understand it – I found out later – they had cast someone in the role that didn’t work out,” he explains. “And that’s when they started bringing a big group of people in. My friends over at Insomniac, to their great credit and to my great honor, had pitched me and the muckety-muck said, ‘Yeah, but he was the lead of the last game, and that’s a very different character. We don’t think he’s right for Spider-Man.’ And they kept pushing until finally, they let me come in and audition with the rest of the people. I’ll always be grateful to them for really going to bat for me and for standing up for me because otherwise, I wouldn’t even have gotten the chance.”
Lowenthal says losing a role is just the business, and that the real work is in auditioning. Despite the never-ending scroll of his IMDb page, he says there are just as many entries – if not more – for the jobs he’s missed out on.
“I audition for the Joker and Batman all the time,” he laughs. “Those are roles that any actor would love. Mark Hamill captured the essence of what everybody loves about the Joker, but I think any actor coming into the role will have a different take on it. You don’t want to throw what everybody loves about the Joker away and start from scratch, [but] it would be me doing it with my history, my proclivities. And that’s another thing about auditioning: We, as actors, get obsessed with trying to figure out what is it they want, and give them what they want. I think that’s a trap we all fall into early on in our careers. And as we get older, we’re like, ‘Oh, it’s not about giving them what they want, it’s about showing up with what you’ve got.’ It’s either right or it isn’t, but you’ve done something that nobody else can give them. If you give them yourself, you’ve got no competition because nobody can give them what you’ve got.
“I sincerely hope that one day we can do an interview where you say, ‘So, you finally got to play the Joker, and here’s what I saw as a difference. What was going through your head?’ So put a pin in that. God knows there are so many iterations. I’ll still get a couple more chances before the end of my career.”
Mark Hamill’s Joker is one example of a famous person coming into the voice acting and video game space and doing the job well. You only have to look at Christopher Judge as Kratos in God of War to see another. But it’s becoming increasingly trendy for Hollywood types to take on big roles in video games. Just recently, Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito played the villain in Far Cry 6, we’ve had The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus in Death Stranding, and The Matrix’s Keanu Reeves was the voice inside your head in Cyberpunk 2077.
“It’s always been a little bit of a thing, but it’s definitely more so [now],” Lowenthal says of Hollywood actors in games. “I have arguably mixed feelings on that. On one hand, sure, it irks me and all my rank and file actor friends when we don’t get a shot at something because somebody wanted to hire a famous person. And sometimes they’re not great at it because it’s a different medium that they’re not used to. And sometimes they’re brilliant at it – some actors are just good at everything. Sometimes they’re right for the role, and sometimes they’re not quite right for the role, but they’re a big name.
“On the other hand, sometimes getting those name actors into a project allows a project to happen. When I was working on Afro Samurai years ago, I’ll be honest, if Samuel L. Jackson had not said, ‘I [expletive] want to do this,’ then it never would have happened, and I wouldn’t have gotten to be on it. You can’t place a star in every role. So if that name is going to get the money from the money people to make it happen, and then they get to hire a bunch of other people like us on the project, it’s hard to argue with that. But yeah, I think it mostly irks me when a name gets hired, and it feels like they’re just phoning it in or they don’t get what video games are. You’re like, ‘Oh man, you could have put a really good actor that you auditioned into that role,’ but I understand that’s not the way it works.”
Luckily for us, Lowenthal isn’t short on opportunities. You’ll be able to see him again soon when he reprises his role as Peter Parker in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, which is launching in 2023, and again when The Sands of Time remake launches in 2022. In the meantime, you can catch Lowenthal on Orbital Redux, a sci-fi show that was streamed live – music, performances, special effects, all of it, live. There’s no rewind button on something like that. You can check Orbital Redux out on WatchDust.tv.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
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