Troy Baker has voiced some of the greatest video game characters of all time. Not even including taking over Harrison Ford’s role as Indy in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, he also has played Sam Drake in Uncharted, Booker DeWitt in Bioshock: Infinite, Higgs in Death Stranding, and of course, Joel Miller in The Last of Us.
During a panel at GalaxyCon New Orleans earlier this month, Baker was asked if playing Joel had affected him personally. He said it had actually affected him “deeply” in many different ways, including feeling “woefully unprepared” for the part.
“There’s nothing worse, and I hope that no one ever feels this, but do you ever show up to something and go ‘I am so woefully unprepared for this’? And, it’s not impostor syndrome, it’s a fact,” he said. “You are not equipped to do the thing that you are about to do. You could be like, ‘let’s go bungee jumping!’, and then you get on the platform and you go, ‘I can’t do this’. That was The Last of Us for me. You get the gig, and then you go, ‘oh no, I have to deliver this’.”
Baker remembered at one point talking with co-star Ashley Johnson, who plays Ellie in the games, and coming to an almost frightening realization. He turned to Johnson and said: “‘Do you realize that if this thing sucks, it’s our fault?'”
He gave credit to Naughty Dog, who already had great success with its Uncharted series, and knew the type of story it wanted to tell next. “We knew that what they were going to make was going to be good,” he said, adding that level of storytelling taught him how to be a better actor.
“It taught me how to stop trying to convince people that I could act, and just realize that Joel has no idea that he’s in a game, and he’s just in a moment in his life. And, I took that lesson, and I applied it all the way across.”
Most recently, Baker reprised the role of Higgs in Death Stranding 2, which was released this month. July also saw the announcement that Baker will voice Jack Pepper, the protagonist of Mouse: P.I. for Hire.
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