Red Dead Redemption 2 Arthur Morgan Interview

September 19, 2021 at 5:36am
By Jason Stettner

Interview with Roger Clark, Actor for (Arthur Morgan) in Red Dead Redemption 2

For convention based interviews we try to present the conversation replies as close to verbatim as possible, for context.

A little bit of background?

Roger: Well of course. Hi my name is Roger Clark, I did the full performance capture for Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2. I'm so thrilled to be lucky enough to be able to come to cons like this and meet the fans and have a chat and the fact that I was pretty much a no named actor before Red Dead came out.

I was just doing theatre in New York, a lot of voice over work. To be part of something that's appreciated by so many people and to be able to chat to the fans is such a gift. We had a year, we had a crazy year. To meet people, like minded nerds again is just so cool.

Great to have you here chatting I guess about Red Dead. So beforehand were you familiar with Rockstar Games, how did you end up getting the role and playing this awesome cowboy?

Roger: Yeah I was a huge fan of Rockstar Games. I remember the first Grand Theft Auto. You're Looking Down. “The Top Down”. Yeah I remember playing that on the first PlayStation. So I was a massive fan of Rockstar Games.

Then when I graduated college I took a break from gaming and I just didn't have the time, but I got back into it with the Xbox 360 and I remember going to GameStop and it had been awhile since I played games. I was like, what do you recommend? What Do you like? I said I like story based, kind of open sandbox games you know and he recommended Skyrim and he recommended the first Red Dead Redemption those were pretty good.

I remember playing the first Red Dead, just through pure chance I finished it and then about a month or two later it was my first audition for Red Dead 2. I didn't know it was for Red Dead 2. It was my first audition.

Must have been amazing. So you not only did the voice, you actually did the motion capture? Tell us a little bit about what it was like preparing for that and you know, performing?

Roger: So it's like Andy Serkis with Planet of the Apes. You see a lot of it now. Mark Ruffalo and The Avengers and stuff. So you're wearing all this spandex and you've got balls and it's in a hanger pretty similar to this. You know there's no cameras, there's no real cameras virtually. They're anyway you want them to be so yeah about ninety percent of Red Dead 2 was performance capture. The other ten percent was probably done in the booth.

A lot of in-game dialogue was done in the booth. But yeah, it's not that dissimilar from film or TV or theatre. We get our lines, in advance. We would rehearse. Act out the scenes with our colleagues and the directors and the animators you know if the sets were dimensionally accurate but it would often be just pipes and scaffolding then the animators would show us computer monitor and then we'd actually see what it looked like in-game.

I love performance capture. It's such a fascinating medium and I've been working on it a while now and seeing the technology advance it's just so quick oh my gosh it's amazing and the freedoms that it affords to performers now it's just really, really exciting and you see now it's more and more films using it. Wait until Avatar comes out. That's going to be insane.

So with that did you find it hard at all to kind of imagine the set?

Roger: It was hard at first that's like with what I said earlier, the animators were so helpful because any time we had a question like if we knew what a set looked like, but we didn't know whether it was day or night, we didn't know if it was hot or cold.

When they showed us what the in-game footage looked like. So we could actually understand what our environment was, that was in-valuable. You know, that really allowed us to put in the little details you know like oh this is in San Diego.

So we're probably going to be somewhere swampy, we might want to swat the odd fly away you know. Or well let's get the ankle weight so that it looks like we're trudging through snow. It was all those little details that we have to think of, take into consideration. I like to think that it helped with the immersiveness of the video game.

It was all beautifully well done, do you have a favorite moment from doing the motion capture?

Roger: There's so many but I love one that I really enjoyed, it's not a pivotal part of the story at all. It was fairly early on when you can go fishing with Dutch and Hosea. Just a little bit of characters. One's the leader of the gang, the other one is kind of the father figure of it.

And you're fishing, and we're singing some songs. Ya know, by the time we filmed it we're about four years into the project I worked on five years, took five years but rehearsing the scenes with those actors at that time we had been working together for some four years by that point. It was really special.

Have you played as yourself?

Roger: I have. I'm on my second playthrough now. First playthrough I got about sixty-five hours into it. I haven't one hundred percented it. I'm not as good as some people.


It takes time and I don't want to take up too much of your time. I just want to leave a last spot for you to mention anything you want to go over, plug-in anything?

Roger: Well like I said before it’s such a privilege for me to be able to come to these cons, I've been to about ten fan expos. I don't know. Maybe not ten, maybe half a dozen now, it's always a pleasure. I do narrate a lot of audio books you catch me on social media.

I've got some projects coming up, some short films, some features. Follow my social media on Twitter and Instagram for details of what's coming up next, some things I can't talk about though. You'll find out about soon.

Thank you so much for your time, I guess to sneak one little thing has Rockstar asked for anything more or?

Roger: Ya know if I told you I'd have to kill you. Then we'd have to delete the footage. "Waves hands" haha. All I know is Rockstar, they keep delivering quality you know If they ever called again I'd pick-up the phone.

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