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  • ️Sat May 15 2021

InkSuitActor / Video Games

Examples of Ink Suit Actors in video games.

  • Karl Bishop Weyland from Aliens vs. Predator (2010) game was modeled after Lance Henriksen who played the android Bishop in Aliens and Charles Weyland in AVP: Alien vs. Predator.
  • Odd case in Anthem (2019): Haluk is based visually on character actor L.J. Batinas, but voiced by Nick Tarabay.
  • The old PlayStation game Apocalypse is frequently boasted as one of the first games to use mo-cap technology, with Bruce Willis voicing and performing motion-capture for the game's hero, Trey Kincaid. Unsurprisingly, this makes Trey appear exactly like Willis during the 3D cutscenes.
  • Most characters in the first few games of Assassin's Creed are modelled after their voice actors.
  • Batman: Arkham Series
  • All over the place in Battlefield 3; Agent Gordon is clearly Glenn Morshower, Blackburn is Gideon Emory with shorter hair, Vladimir is Ilia Volok with extra scars...a weird case, though, is Dima, who is modeled after Oleg Taktarov, but voiced by Andre Sogliuzzo.
  • Beyond: Two Souls entire cast (including Elliot Page) falls under this category, since they have provided the voice, likeness, and full motion-capture performance for their roles.
  • BioWare has been doing this a lot in their games since they started using modern game engines:
    • Yvonne Strahovski's character in Mass Effect 2, Miranda Lawson, is basically her with, um, larger assets. Originally, Miranda was even a blonde, like her actress, but the team felt the character worked better with black hair.
    • The Illusive Man from the same series looks remarkably similar to Martin Sheen, only a bit younger.
    • Mass Effect 3 also adds in Jessica Chobot, a real-life journalist playing fictional journalist Diana Allers, with her actual likeness, and Keith David as Admiral Anderson. The humanoid version of EDI also bears more than a passing resemblance, physically, to voice actress Tricia Helfer.
    • Tallis, from the Dragon Age: Redemption Web Series, is played by Felicia Day, who is serving as this for said character in the Dragon Age II DLC Mark of the Assassin.
    • An unintentional example is Bastila Shan from Knights of the Old Republic. When developers realised her official artwork greatly resembled Jennifer Hale, they decided to run with the idea and redesign the character to include these similarities.
  • Brütal Legend: Eddie Riggs in was deliberately designed to look a bit like Jack Black, even before it was a done deal that Black was playing him. There's also Ozzy Osbourne as the Guardian of Metal, Lemmy as the Kill Master, Rob Halford as The Fire Baron, Brian Posehn as the Hunter, and Kyle Gass as the neurotic cannoneer.
  • Call of Duty:
  • In Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Genesis was modelled after his Japanese voice actor, GACKT.
  • Cyberpunk 2077:
    • Keanu Reeves provides his likeness to the Deuteragonist, Johnny Silverhand. He also provided motion capture and speaking lines (but not the singing voice).
    • The game's expansion Phantom Liberty has Idris Elba lend his voice and likeness to Solomon Reed.
  • Dead Space's major characters are modeled after their voice actors. Peter Mensah does Hammond, Tonantzin Carmelo does Kendra, Navid Negahban does Mercer, Keith Szarabajka does Kyne and Iyari Limon does Nicole. The biggest exception was Isaac Clarke in the original, who had no dialogue (beyond screaming and grunting) and whose face was only shown at the end. When he started talking and showing his face more in 2, they changed his model to look much closer to his voice actor, Gunner Wright; and as they recast Nicole, they changed her model to match her new actress, Tanya Clarke.
  • The entire main cast of Death Stranding is made of scans of the characters' actors, who also provided voices and motion capture. Sam, for instance, is a perfect copy of Norman Reedus right down to his tattoos, while Fragile and Higgs are the splitting image of Léa Seydoux and Troy Baker respectively. The only outliers would be Deadman (likeness of Guillermo del Toro, played by Jesse Corti) and Heartman (likeness of Nicolas Winding Refn, voice of Darren Jacobs). Many cameos are also scans of different people, but they're usually voiced by prolific industry voice actors.
  • Several characters in Destiny 2 look like their voice actors: Sloane (Cissy Jones), Ana Bray (Jamie Chung), Lord Saladin (Keith Ferguson) and the Drifter (Todd Haberkorn).
  • Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening: The game's cutscenes were filmed using motion capture, and if you find the behind-the-scenes videos of the recording sessions, you'll notice that the voice actors (particularly Reuben Langdon for Dante) look very much like their assigned characters.
  • Devil May Cry 4: According to Lead Motion Manager Hiroyuki Nara in page 216 of the 3142 Graphic Arts artbook, Agnus's voice actor, T.J. Storm, "looked just like him".
  • There's a mod for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion that replaces Uriel Septim's head with Patrick Stewart's head.
  • In The Expanse: A Telltale Series, Drummer is designed after her voice actress, Cara Gee. In this case, it is justified, as Gee played Drummer in the live action series.
  • Fallout:
    • Many of the "talking heads" in the original Fallout bear at least some resemblance to their voice actors.
    • Flak in Fallout 3 appears to be modeled after voice actor Gus Travers. Likewise, James is modeled after Liam Neeson.
    • In Fallout: New Vegas, Bruce Isaac looks like Gregory Alan Williams, and Sunny Smiles resembles Katherine Pawlak (when she's not wearing bangs). Likewise for Benny (Matthew Perry), Mr. House (René Auberjonois), The King (James Horan), Nero (Alex Mendoza), Julie Farkas (Laura Bailey), Arcade Gannon (Zachary Levi), Veronica Santangelo (Felicia Day), Raul (Danny Trejo), Colonel Moore (Kirsten Potter), President Kimball (Monte Markham), Chief Hanlon (Kris Kristofferson), Ambassador Crocker (Emerson Brooks), Cass (Rachel Roswell), Caesar (John Doman), Vulpes Inculta (Jason Spisak), Aurelius of Phoenix (Yuri Lowenthal), Follows-Chalk (Christian Lanz), Waking Cloud (Misi Lecube), Daniel (Rick Pasqualone),Trudy (Lora Cain), Doc Mitchell (Michael Hogan), Stella (Eliza Schneider), Father Elijah (Richard Herd), Samuel Cooke (Avery Kidd Waddell), and the Forecaster (Anthony Crehan), as seen here. And the default male and female Courier faces are modeled after Yuri Lowenthal and Laura Bailey, respectively.
    • Fallout 4's characters who are modeled after their VA's include the Vault-Tec Rep (Paul Eiding), Nick Valentine (Stephen Russell), Preston Garvey (Jon Gentry), Mama Murphy (Maya Massar), Piper Wright (Courtney Ford), Travis Miles (Brendan Hunt), Magnolia (Lynda Carter), Desdemona (Claudia Christian), Deacon (Ryan Alosio), Glory (Chelsea Tavares), Tinker Tom (Byron Marc Newsome), Paladin Danse (Peter Jessop), Lancer Captain Kells (Tim Russ), Scribe Haylen (Jan Johns), Conrad Kellogg (Keythe Farley), Unmutated Brian Vergil (Matthew Waterson), Synth Shaun (Aidan Sussman), Father (Tony Amendola), MacCready (Matthew Mercer), Liam Binet (Fineas O'Connell), Rex Goodman (Richard Tatum), Swanson (Christopher Salazar), Honest Dan (Jonathan Roumie), Gwen McNamara (Cindy Robinson), Bobby de Luca (Brandon Bales), Cait (Katy Townsend), and Irma (Elisabeth Noone).
    • Also in Fallout 4, that game's Dogmeat was modeled after River (his creator's pet German Shepherd), his canine voice and mocap actor. Dogmeat was also programmed to mimic some of River's behaviors, such as running ahead during walks and then stopping to make sure the humans were still there and fetching items as a show of affection.
  • Far Cry:
  • Gears of War:
    • Augustus Cole looks exactly like his voice actor, Lester Speight. Which is the whole point, since the entire idea behind the character was to pretty much just take Terry Tate, Office Linebacker and put him in a video game, which included getting the same guy to play him.
    • Aaron Griffin looks like Ice-T. Again, this is the whole point, since Ice-T is a fan of the series and (perhaps half-jokingly) asked to be put in the game. He probably wasn't actually expecting them to say yes.
  • Ghost of Tsushima main cast are all modeled after their English voice actors.
  • In the upcoming Ghost of Yōtei, the protagonist is clearly modeled after her voice actor Erika Ishii.
  • Granblue Fantasy: Nobuo Uematsu appears as "Nobiyo", one of the most famous composers in the sky and basically is just Uematsu in the Granblue art style, and he also does the voicework.
  • Grand Theft Auto:
    • In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Cuban gang leader Umberto Robina, Colombian drug lord Ricardo Diaz, and corrupt Texan land developer Avery Carrington resemble their voice actors Danny Trejo, Luis Guzman, and Burt Reynolds respectively. Trejo and Guzman also reprise their respective roles in the prequel Vice City Stories.
    • In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas quite a few of the characters are modeled off of their voice actors, including James Woods as MIB Mike Toreno, David Cross as Zero, Charlie Murphy as Jizzy B, and, perhaps most notably, Samuel L. Jackson as Officer Frank Tenpenny who also shares some of the mannerisms Jackson typically has in his other films. The Grove Street gang, meanwhile, is mostly modeled after the members of N.W.A.: CJ is Dr. Dre, Ryder is Eazy E, and Sweet is Ice Cube.
    • Phil Collins is the first celebrity to appear As Himself in the GTA series in Vice City Stories. There is even a mission involving him where the player must prevent the Forelli mob from sabotaging Phil's concert.
    • In Grand Theft Auto IV, Ricky Gervais and Katt Williams appear as themselves for the Split Sides Comedy Club routines (with Frankie Boyle added for the Lost and the Damned DLC) while former UFC fighter Bas Rutten appears as a hyper-masculine parody of himself in The Men's Room in-game TV show.
    • Grand Theft Auto V does this with all of its principal characters.
  • In Grey Goo (2015), Lucy Tak, the human commander, is closely modeled on her voice actor, Jing Lusi.
  • Halo:
  • Half-Life 2: Dr. Judith Mossman looks very much like Michelle Forbes.
  • In Haven (2020), Yu (Janine Harouni), Kay (Chris Lew Kum Hoi), Erena (Jane Perry), and Ozias (Harrison Collett) are all designed after their voice actors.
  • Heavy Rain: The four main characters basically look like their voice/mocap actors. Especially Scott Shelby looks exactly the same as the actor who plays him.
  • In Hidden Agenda (2017), Katie Cassidy provided the voice, motion capture, and physical likeness for main character Becky Marney.
  • In Horizon Zero Dawn, the character Sylens looks exactly like his voice actor, Lance Reddick, but with a few extra tech additions to his face and body.
  • inFAMOUS: Second Son basically let's you play as a super-powered Troy Baker. Also, Travis Willingham and Laura Bailey resemble Reggie and Fetch respectively
  • James Bond
  • L.A. Noire used Motion Capture technology, developed specifically for the game, to fully capture the actors' facial expression. Recognizable actors among the cast include Aaron Staton of Mad Men and John Noble of Fringe.
  • The Like a Dragon series is well-known for featuring the likenesses of its voice actors rendered realistically. Many of those actors include veterans of Japanese gangster films, such as Takeshi Kitano and Riki Takeuchi, as well as famous AV actresses portraying hostesses. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, with its Hawaiian setting, extended the practice to American film stars such as Danny Trejo and internet personalities such as Kson On Air.
  • Mafia: Definitive Edition, the remake of Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, has many of the characters redesigned to resemble their new voice actors.
  • Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 features a New York senator named Lieber, which happens to be the real last name of his actor.
  • For Max Payne 3, James McCaffrey reprises the role of Max and also provides his likeness.
  • Metal Gear:
  • Mortal Kombat 11:
    • Shang Tsung's appearance is that of Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, who portrayed him in the 1995 film and returns to voice him here.
    • Played with by the Terminator, RoboCop, and Rambo. Their appearances (or at least, the Terminator's human tissue coating's appearance) are based on Arnold Schwarzenegger, Peter Weller, and Sylvester Stallone, respectively, but the Terminator is voiced by Chris Cox instead of Arnie himself (though he gave his blessing for his likeness and picked Cox), and while Weller and Stallone returned to respectively voice RoboCop and Rambo, the characters are based on how the actors looked in the respective franchises' prime, not as they looked at the time of recording, leading to Vocal Dissonance where the old actors voice their younger characters.
    • A DLC pack brings the likeness and voices of the 1995 movie for Raiden (Christopher Lambert), Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby), and Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras).
  • Mortal Kombat 1:
  • Need For Speed: The Run features accurate CGI representations of Sean Faris and Christina Hendricks, the latter even depicted accurately with regards to her, um, proportions.
  • All three games in the Onimusha trilogy each featured a protagonist modeled after an actor: the first game stars Takeshi Kaneshiro as Samanosuke, while Jubei Yagyu in the second game was based on the late Yusaku Matsuda. Samanosuke returned for the third game, where he is joined by french soldier Jacques Blanc, based off none other than Jean Reno, who also did the French dialogue at the start of the game before Translator Microbes forces him to speak with another voice. This reliance on the use on actors likenesses is part of the reason why Capcom took so long to re-release the series on modern consoles and even then, they only got the rights to re-release the first Onimusha.
  • Tom "Rust" Bishop, a DLC character in PAYDAY 2 is modeled after his VA, Ron Perlman.
  • In Perfect Dark Zero, Joanna Dark resembles voice actress Laurence Bouvard (albeit with red hair). Ditto Dahlia Gillespie in Silent Hill: Origins and Jennifer in Terminator: Resistance.
  • Red Dead Redemption 2: Arthur (Roger Clark), Dutch (Benjamin Byron Davis), Bill (Steve J. Palmer), Hosea (Curzon Dobell), Jack (Ted Sutherland), Leopold (Howard Pinhasik), Sadie (Alex McKenna), Susan (Kaili Vernoff), Tilly (Meeya Davis-Glover), Micah (Peter Blomquist), and Swanson (Sean Haberle) greatly resemble their real-life voice actors.
  • As far back as the first Max Payne game, Remedy Entertainment has been modeling the bulk of its characters off of actual peoples' likenesses rather than designing them from scratch, a practice that was unheard of in the late nineties during the production of that game. It works in tandem with their usage of Medium Blending in the form of Live-Action Cutscenes and photographs, which started as a cost-saving measure before gradually becoming part of the studio's Creator Thumbprint. As technology has advanced through the years, Remedy has prided itself on creating exact digital doubles of their actors, going so far as to take molds of their actors' teeth and scanning them into the game so that even that part of them is accurate to life. Due to the often long production time of Remedy's games, this can sometimes cause some Off-Model inconsistencies between the character models and their live-action actors if too much time passes- in Alan Wake II, Alan's hair is a bit longer in the live-action sequences than on his character model, for instance. To quote Shawn Ashmore on Twitter:

    "I will never forget loading the game and seeing the opening scene and the university campus for the first time. Being apart of films and television is surreal but controlling a character that looks exactly like you hits different!"

  • Rise To Honor: Jet Li provided his voice, likeness, and motion capture performance for this 2004 Playstation 2 game.
  • From Saints Row: The Third onwards, Johnny Gat is almost a perfect match to his voice actor Daniel Dae Kim.
  • Silent Hill series:
    • James Sunderland, the main character of Silent Hill 2 was modeled after his voice and mocap actor Guy Cihi.
    • Claudia Wolf in Silent Hill 3 looks like an older albino version of voice actress Donna Burke, who also voiced and was the design basis for Angela Orosco in the previous game.
    • Henry Townshend and Eileen Galvin from Silent Hill 4: The Room are modeled after VA's Eric Bossick and Anna Kunnecke, respectively.
    • Much like the original game, Silent Hill 2 (Remake) modeled most of its characters after their voice actors, including James (Luke Roberts), Maria/Mary (Salóme Gunnarsdóttir), Angela (Gianna Kiehl), and Laura (Evie Templeton). The only exception is Eddie, who was modeled after Danny Kirrane but voiced by Scott Haining.
  • Slaps and Beans is a a retraux game set in the 1970s that pays homage to the many onscreen collaborations between Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, where the player are in control of digitized sprites resembling those two actors in their primes, right down to Bud's mustache.
  • Seen so much in Spider-Man (PS4) that the only major ones who don't resemble their voice actors are Spidey himself, Mary Jane, Yuri Watanabe, and the Kingpin.
  • SpyHunter: Nowhere to Run had Dwayne Johnson, AKA The Rock, provide his voicework and likeness to main character, Alex Decker.
  • Star Wars:
    • The Force Unleashed:
      • Several of the characters are modeled after their voice actors, most notably Sam Witwer as Galen Marek (when he joined Smallville it can be a bit surprising), Nathalie Cox as Juno Eclipse, and Cully Fredrickson as Rahm Kota, as well as Adrienne Wilkinson as Maris Blood. As with the above example, it works rather nicely.
      • The use of motion capture to better animate the characters' faces (by capturing the facial expressions of the voice actors) was a huge factor in this.
    • The former Mandalorian turned Psycho for Hire Montross from Star Wars: Bounty Hunter was rendered in the likeness of Clancy Brown.
    • Ink Suit Acting in LucasArts games goes all the way back to Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight with the main characters rendered in the likeness of the actors who portrayed them in the live action cutscenes. Jason Court hasn't been Kyle Katarn's voice actor for everything, but his appearance has continued on through several additional games. On a different note, the Star Wars Customizable Card Game's portraits for Talon Karrde and Corran Horn depicted their creators (Timothy Zahn and Michael J. Stackpole) in costume as their characters.
    • This has become an enforced trope on a number of occasions when actors from the films have been asked to voice their movie characters in video games. Most prominently, Billy Dee Williams has voiced Lando Calrissian in a number of games, including Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, as well as multiple entries in the LEGO Star Wars and Battlefront series.
  • Stray is an unusual case. The meows and cat sounds in the game? An actual ginger cat named Lala, who is the spitting image of the adorable in-game moggie.
  • Three central characters in the 2012 Syndicate reboot look very much like their voice actors Michael Wincott, Rosario Dawson and Brian Cox.
  • Star Trek Online has appearances by (usually aged-up) versions of several characters from the live-action Star Trek series, with the original Trek actors voicing the characters. The game started out with Leonard Nimoy as Spock, and so far has added Denise Crosby playing Empress Sela and a once-again-time-shifted Natasha Yar, Michael Dorn playing Ambassador Worf, son of Mogh, and as of Season 10, nearly the entire cast of Star Trek: Voyager (as well as a few supporting characters) save for Janeway and Chakotay. Also, Captain Va'Kel Shon, CO of the Enterprise-F, is the spitting image of his voice actor Dave Rivas, except Andorian and clean-shaven instead of human with a goatee.
  • Tachyon: The Fringe stars Bruce Campbell as the voice of protagonist Jake Logan. The resemblance◊ is uncanny◊.
  • Until Dawn: Entire cast of characters provide their likeness, voice, and motion capture performances for their roles.
  • Michael Rooker, who played Merle Dixon in The Walking Dead, had his appearance digitized and used in The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, a video game based on the show continuity, featuring Merle as an important character.
  • Vin Diesel does this frequently. Wheelman, for instance, was labelled "Vin Diesel: Wheelman", as a pile of polygons arranged in a not-un-Vin-like shape 'played' Milo Burik, an undercover CIA agent.