Like several other first-party Sony games, Marvel’s Wolverine relied on motion-capture work to draw an authentic performance from its cast. Spartacus actor Liam McIntyre plays the iconic mutant in Insomniac’s new game, and in a recent interview, he explained how the role required him to dig deep to find the feral side of Wolverine that erupts from him whenever he enters a berserker state.
While McIntyre originally wanted to reference rabid dogs for inspiration–content “which is, first of all, very hard to find, probably for the best,” he said to EW–his take on the character seeing red did terrify the team at Insomniac Games.
“I guess that’s good, right? Being terrifying,” McIntyre said. “But, suddenly, I was like, ‘I’m really scared to go all out with this,’ but they’re such a good team that you feel safe. They will help me if it’s not gonna work. They will tell me. They won’t just let it happen. So I got to take some really huge swings with my character as a result of being able to trust them so much.”
Marvel’s Wolverine animation director Brian Wyser and narrative director Walt Williams added that McIntyre delivered not only the “raw” performance that the studio was looking for, but he also embodied the humanity of the character, who has spent decades being hurt by other people, inflicting that pain back on them, and has tried to bottle up his emotions. “You don’t have that level of rage or pain if you don’t have a genuinely deep yearning, caring heart inside of you,” Williams said.
Out on September 15 for PS5, Marvel’s Wolverine follows the mutant as he rejoins Team X to stop Sentinel creator Bolivar Trask from kidnapping mutants all across the globe. With the X-Men not yet formed, it’s up to Wolverine to lead the charge by slicing and dicing his way through enemies like the ninja death-cult The Hand and the cybernetic mercenaries known as the Reavers. For more on the game, you can check out all the Easter eggs we spotted in the recent State of Play gameplay preview, every costume in the game so far, and why the game looks like it might be playing it safe.