Ubisoft explains Sam Fisher actor change for Splinter Cell: Blacklist
Splinter Cell: Blacklist is introducing a brand new actor for Sam Fisher.
Michael Ironside, involved with the series since the first game, will not be returning. Ubisoft has instead decided to bring in Eric Johnson.
What led to the change? Splinter Cell: Blacklist creative director Maxime Béland explained to IGN:
“Basically, before we would use motion capture. So we would hire an actor to play the body of Sam. Then we would have Michael Ironside play the voice of Sam, and then we would have animators animate the facial of Sam. So you kind of had this thing where you have three performers – you had Michael Ironside for the voice, the animator that’s doing the performance for the face and then you had another body performer.
“So on Blacklist we knew that we wanted to raise the bar of our scripted events, of our cinematics, and to do that we knew we had to go to performance capture. The difference between motion capture and performance capture is that with performance capture, you’re capturing everything at the same time. So we had one actor doing the body, the voice and the face. We have a camera that’s recording all the facial animations so right there, because you’re capturing a true actor’s performance, and the level of quality is raised instantly.
“The problem that we faced was that we needed someone to play Sam that was not only the voice but also had the physicality that Sam Fisher has. That’s why we had to go with an actor that was able to do that, so we found Eric Johnson.”
Ubisoft applied this same reasoning when it hired Kate Drummond to play the role of Sam’s longtime colleague Grim.
