David Bateson’s wife wants him to get a barcode tattoo on the back of his slick head. That way he can look even more like the character he’s best known for voicing – Hitman‘s protagonist, Agent 47. Looking at him on the video call, he could easily play the part in a live-action show where Agent 47 has hung up his silverballer pistols, but he’s pulled back into the world of assassination, buffing up his shiny dome for one last job. That’s what the people of IO Interactive’s home of Copenhagen must have seen when Bateson headed over for a booze-up – a grizzled professional returning for more wetwork.
“We had a Hitman 3 launch party that was delayed by 15 months, and I was wearing a tattoo – a transfer that was made in Germany – and I forgot I had it on,” Bateson tells GLHF. “I got onto the train to come into town and I scared the crap out of people. I’m in character and I’m dressed like the man, they’re looking at the barcode in the back of my head and the cameras are coming out, they’re doing sneaky little selfies.”
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It’s no big surprise that he got attention – it’s hard to blend with the crowd when you’re the voice behind one of the country’s proudest exports. Whether he’s going to make Agent 47’s distinctive barcode tattoo a permanent part of his body, though, depends on whether or not people can convince him whilst he’s “moderately drunk”. Or, you know, we could all tell him to do it on Twitter. I’ll leave you to prepare.
Portraying the same character for 20 years over various iterations of the Hitman series, Bateson has a rare honor in video games, a medium where voice talent is often unceremoniously swapped out for reboots and sequels. The same can be said for American actor Jane Perry, who has played Agent 47’s handler, Diana Burnwood – a dulcet-voiced spy with a British accent – for the past ten years. But despite the two actors working on the same series together for a decade, they only met with the release of the latest game, Hitman 3. All their voice work on the series has been performed in booths, in isolation from the rest of the cast.
“I had the impulse many times to reach out to David on Twitter, like a fan. I felt a little bit shy about doing it, and I just didn’t understand why he hadn’t reached out to me,” Perry says, laughing. “I mean, that was an option. No, but really, it suits the ethos of their relationship to have a bit of distance between them. Diana is presumably in some office somewhere surrounded by computers and tech equipment, and Agent 47 is out in the world doing his thing.”
Ironically, Hitman 3 is also the only game in the series’ 20-year history where Agent 47 and Diana work together physically in the field. For all the other games, Diana is predominantly a voice on the radio. Their characters met in-game around the same time they met in person as actors.
“It’s funny, isn’t it? How life imitates art,” Perry muses.
Despite not meeting each other until recently, they know these characters intimately. They’ve occupied them for a large portion of their lives, watched them grow and evolve, and evolved as performers alongside them.
“The thing that remains consistent with Diana is her fierce intelligence and her wryness – she’s got that wonderful wry sense of humor that has always been there, right from the beginning of my rendition of her,” Perry says. “Those are things that I adore. And then in terms of her evolution, she’s a little bit more heart. There’s care for Agent 47. They’ve been through so much together, and I think she’s evolved into this multi-dimensional human being.”
“I definitely felt that when Diana says, ‘Good luck’ and ‘I’ll leave you to prepare,’” Bateson adds. “There’s more concern there. There’s nothing romantic as such, it’s just that we have been through a lot together. Our relationship has definitely deepened.”
Agent 47 himself has gone from a monosyllabic monster – the Silent Assassin – to an agent with agency over the course of the games. In Hitman: Absolution, he was forced to go rogue, and that changed his outlook on the world, giving the writers and Bateson more freedom to lean into his humanity. He’s still a cold-hearted killer, but there’s some kind of internal logic and twisted morality underpinning it.
“There was a shift in attitude at IO Interactive with the writing,” Bateson says. “They wanted to make the players feel more involved in these long sequences of stalking and finding a way around the levels, so they give them all this extra dialogue. I know it seems pretty random, but it all added up to allow Agent 47 to express himself in a wry and dry and dark sort of way. We’ve all grown up a bit together, so we’ve all got to know the characters better, and the writers know us. It’s a wonderful synergy of creative juices, which has evolved over the years.”
To get into the mindset of Agent 47, a tragic character who was raised to be a tool for the powerful, Bateson sometimes found himself tapping into the darker corners of his own mind. These days, he slips into the character like a pair of fingerless gloves, of course, but there used to be a place where he would go inside his head before speaking into the microphone in a lonely booth.
“In the earlier days, the recording sessions were shorter, so we really had to get into character quickly,” Bateson explains. “I used to just take the feeling of my aloneness from my upbringing. It’s nothing sad – I come from a loving family – but my upbringing was fragmentary. I always felt like I was on the outside looking in. I would contemplate that.”
This isn’t the only time Bateson has found himself looking inwards to pull Agent 47 from his psyche, either. Hitman might seem like a dark, uncompromising game, but it’s balanced against the absurd, often slapstick in its sensibilities. It’s a game where you can trip people up with banana skins, and the best assassinations are often poetic or ironic. It comes from the same school of humor as ‘90s British sitcom Bottom, which, of course, Bateson is a fan of. Another influence behind his deadpan delivery is Charlie Chaplin.
“He invented this thing called surreal humor, where he put two different worlds together and create a third world,” Bateson says. “And that was dark and weird for me. But he also had this cruel humor of happily either letting himself or other people fall down the manholes or get hit by a truck or, or just missing a truck and then hitting by a train. It’s bizarre, but I trust sick humor. Although I will say this: I don’t like it to be too cruel. I like the cleverness of dry humor. For example, in the Hitman series, my favorite forms of death are when you drop something on someone.”
The cartoon anvil has persisted as a running gag for a reason – there’s something timeless about seeing someone get injured by something ridiculous. It’s the same sense of absurdity you get when you see a trained killer dressed as a pink flamingo, slapping someone with a fish. It’s what makes using guns in Hitman feel almost déclassé.
While IO Interactive is currently hard at work on its James Bond game – working title: Project 007 – it hasn’t given up on Agent 47. Hitman 3 has a full extra year of content on the way, including ray tracing for PC (imagine those bald head reflections, goddamn), a whole new mode with roguelite elements, a playable, customizable safehouse area, and a new map, codenamed “Rocky”. Good luck, 47.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
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