This isn't the John Marston we see in Red Dead Redemption. That made interacting with him a little easier too - it didn't feel like trying to give the John Marston a hard time. He hasn't learned a lot of what we see in the first Red Dead Redemption, and I thought Rob portrayed that beautifully: those little details of this younger, slightly more immature guy. A lot of the scripts helped that too, because it's a different John Marston. You can’t out-Marston John Marston, so I was more focused on my own journey - I just tried to get John out of my head. “Having had the luxury of working with Rob, I knew that I was gonna have to do my own thing. I mean, I know for a fact our NDAs were more strict than Disney’s or Marvel’s.

The secrecy for a video game seems to be on a completely different level. “People starting to think, ‘Who is this Roger Clark? He’s shite.’ If I'm reading that, and I'm still a year out from finishing my work, who knows what impact that would have had? I’m glad we had the tunnel vision we had, but again, at the same time, I don't run a game studio. “Had I been brought into the public knowledge a little bit before the game came out, I can only begin to think how that may have affected my performance,” Clark explains. Clark was going to have to fill the enormous cowboy boots of John Marston actor Rob Wiethoff. This raises an intriguing point: Arthur Morgan is not the protagonist of the inaugural Red Dead Redemption game.

Despite having to keep his role hush hush, he was at home replaying Red Dead Redemption, which he had coincidentally rolled credits on around a month prior to auditioning. But yeah, Mick showed up and I was like, ‘Hello, welcome,’ and he's like, ‘Holy shit, this is what you're doing.’ And it got to the point where like, three or four years in, people were saying to me, ‘Oh, you're still working on that video game, Rog.’ They were starting to think I was full of shit.”Įvidently, Clark was not full of shit. I can only imagine what problems that would have brought. “For example, people may have had trouble with fans hanging outside where we shot and stuff. I think that lended us a focus that we might not have had if we were working in a much more public environment.

But it can also be very helpful, because we were working very much in a tunnel atmosphere and we had the horse’s blinkers on. Sometimes you get nervous about social media, especially if rumours are starting to point in your direction. “You get paranoid if it's something that's really anticipated like Red Dead. “It's hard, especially in the long-term, if you're working on a very long project not being able to talk about it with anyone,” Clark says. The performers need to know what they're doing and why they're doing it to come up with a more accurate, truthful performance. I understand there's a need to be competitive and for NDAs and whatnot, but if you barely trust the talent with the big narrative picture, maybe you need to reassess the way you’re telling stories.

Scripts are often a lot more fluid with gaming than they are in other mediums because the cost of reshooting or adding things down the road isn’t as significant as it is on, for example, a film set. Sometimes those things simply haven’t been conceived or confirmed from on high yet. It’s a bit of a tricky one - how much do you want to keep your talent in the dark? And when does that start to infringe on their performance? It’s also worth mentioning though that a lot of the time the studios are not purposefully withholding important plot and character points from the actor. “We would always ask for it as soon in advance as possible, and maybe about a year or two in, I realised sometimes they don't write it until ten or 15 minutes before you show up. “I can tell that was definitely intentional on their part, especially for some of the dialogue,” Clark tells me. Related: Red Dead Online Is Better With Friends

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