Warning, spoilers for Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree lie ahead.
While everyone loves Messmer, another Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree chracter that’s become a hit is Igon, the warrior who shows up at one point to essentially drop a brutally scathing diss track on big bad dragon boss Bayle the Dread. As it turns out, the actor who delivered those lines, Richard Charles Lintern, had a pretty bewildering, but fun, time doing so.
In an interview with IGN, Lintern has recounted his experience working with FromSoft and Miyazaki on the DLC, which was his first foray into video game voice acting, despite having appeared in plenty of TV shows, films, and theatre productions.
“I’m not entirely stupid, but I had not heard of Mr. Miyazaki before,” the actor said, “I didn’t know the game, and I didn’t know the status of the game, and I didn’t know his status. But when I walked into the room, his status was very clear, very clear immediately. Everyone was very friendly, but at the same time, I could see that this was a bigger deal than I’d imagined it was going to be.”
He continues that while he found the lines he was given for Igon “largely incomprehensible” at first, aside from the obvious themes that the character was in pain and really, really harboured a deep, burning distate for aome fellow named Bayle.
A couple of hours into what turned out to be a much more intense and lengthy recording process than Lintern had anticipated given the size of the part, the actor flagged what he thought must be a mistake in the script, as Igon flipped from taking about having won a battle to having lost one. “There was this awkward pause on the other side of the screen. And eventually, someone came back to me saying, ‘It’s a video game, Richard. Sometimes you defeat the beast, and sometimes the beast defeats you. We need both options’,” Lintern recealled, adding – in wonderfully slightly out-of-touch old guy fashion: “I hadn’t thought about that.”
That said, it definitely sounds like he came to ‘get’ the spirit of the whole thing as it went along, saying: “The attention to detail that was given to the character and the performance was pretty much greater than anything I’ve experienced before. Comparable with characters in Shakespeare that I’ve played and stuff. People were taking it extremely seriously.”
Lintern concluded that the experience was “was very mysterious. Mr. Miyazaki was a very mysterious character, but it was enjoyable. It felt creative, and it felt engaged,” adding that seeing the response to his work on Elden Ring has been “a real revelation for me, and really, really interesting”.
If you’re still battling your own way through Shadow of the Erdtree and need a bit of help beating Bayle or any of the bits you can’t enilst the help of the world’s angriest dragonslayer for, make sure to check out our huge array of guides.
