Actor Roger Clark played Arthur Morgan in Rockstar’s celebrated 2018 Western Red Dead Redemption 2, and his performance was memorable for many reasons. In the game, Arthur suffers from tuberculosis, and he coughs a lot as a result. Was it challenging for Clark to perform those sequences in particular? Yes, but it was “not as bad as you’d think,” Clark said in a recent interview, in part because sometimes Clark recorded when he himself had a bad cough.
Clark told Cade Onder that he had “five years to spread it out,” regarding his voice-capture performance in Red Dead 2, and that’s part of the reason why it wasn’t as difficult as you might imagine. Additionally, Clark said if he was performing a “really bad coughing scene,” this would be saved for the end of a given recording day, when his voice was already hoarse from all the work.
Beyond this, Clark said over that five-year period, when he recorded his lines, he, like most people, got sick–and he used this to his benefit.
“In five years, there’s plenty of colds. There was a lot of data we got that was pretty damn genuine. […] I’d be like ‘Hey, I’ve got a cold, let me get in there.’ And they’d be like, ‘Okay.’ […] Nice good bit of phlegm,” he said.
In addition to his leading role in Red Dead 2, Clark is known for his roles in the games Fort Solis, Rosewater, and Marathon. He won Best Performance for his role as Arthur Morgan at The Game Awards in 2018.
With more than 87 million copies sold, Red Dead 2 is one of the top five best-selling games of all time. Rockstar’s next big release is GTA 6, which launches in November for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Given the immense critical and commercial success of the Red Dead series, a third game from Rockstar (or actually fourth, counting Red Dead Revolver) is expected sometime down the road, but definitely not soon.