Beyond bringing back Captain John Price and Ghost, Infinity Ward narrative director Jeff Negas only had a rough idea of what he was looking for when he set out to cast Xbox’s upcoming “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.”
“I think our process is fairly unique in this way. I know some games do it this way, but we often start with a design of a character rather than anything too ultra specific,” Negas tells Variety. “We’ll have some concept art, maybe more, in terms of how they would be styled. But as far as the specific person goes, we do one to one likeness using our capture process, and often who the character is greatly influenced by the actor that we get in order to play the character. It’s very, very similar to movies. Sometimes they’ll have more or less exactly what they’re looking for and find exactly that person. And we do some of that, but it’s very much the opposite direction, too.”
Beginning with “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” in 2007, the “Modern Warfare” storyline marked the first “CoD” games to break from the franchise’s original World War II setting. Infinity Ward’s “Modern Warfare” games have largely been set in the Middle East and follow the story Captain John Price (voiced by Barry Sloane) and Task Force 141 team’s mission to defeat terrorist Vladimir Makarov. That story will continue with the fall launch of “Modern Warfare 4,” which features a war that breaks out between North and South Korea.
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Handpicked by Negas and his team at the Activision-owned studio, the “Modern Warfare 4” cast is a sprawling lineup made up of “CoD” vets and several franchise newcomers: Sloane as Captain John Price, Mads Mikkelsen as The Archer (pictured above), Samuel Roukin as Simon “Ghost” Riley, Elliot Knight as Kyle “Gaz” Garrick, Young Mazino as Private Park / Park Jun, Luke Tennie as Lieutenant West, Warren Kole as Commander Philip Graves, Rya Kihlstedt as Kate Laswell, María Elisa Camargo as Valeria Garza, Kaiji Tang as Zhiqiang “Zimo” Wong, Daniel J. Kim as Moon, Joseph Lee as Cal, Julian Kostov as Vladimir Makarov, William Lipton as Corporal Joseph Dunn, and Prisca Kim as Ri Ju-Young.
Negas, a veteran of PlayStation’s “Uncharted” and “The Last of Us” studio Naughty Dog with a background in live-action film and TV, has been with Infinity Ward for more than a decade. He has served as the narrative director on Xbox’s “Modern Warfare” franchise since 2022 and cast the second and third games.
“A long time ago, when we had Samuel come in for Ghost and we were trying to find that right character, his voice has this much lower end growl to it,” Negas recalls of Roukin’s casting in the iconic role of the masked character Ghost. “That’s something that I think with a different person or a different way of playing it, it might not feel as grounded. But he somehow walks that line between the two things.”
As Negas and the Infinity Ward team were shaping the main storyline for “Modern Warfare 4,” there where times where they would “rewrite parts of the character” when an actor was found that “had some extra qualities we didn’t know that we wanted.”
“When Prisca came in, who plays Ri Ju Young, who is high up in the North Korean regime, there was a way that she was playing it that I think wasn’t necessarily what we were expecting,” Negas says. “I think we initially thought sort of grandiose bigger gestures and things like that, and she played it so small and so focused, it really became a lot more about a quiet power than it was something that needed to be much bigger and broader.”
The process also required a balance between finding the exact right fit for a part and avoiding typecasting, like when bringing in Mikkelsen, an actor known for playing a great villain, as the game’s main villain.
“It’s a delicate balance with somebody like Mads Mikkelsen because he’s so recognizable in that way, as you say. But that was something we were looking for in this character,” Negas says. “Price wants to kill him and he’s willing to go to some great lengths to do so, and I think we needed something the audience could recognize, a wider audience could recognize, as quickly as we could. But at the same time, he’s such a killer actor. We also knew that he wouldn’t be bringing exactly what he did to other roles that we’d be able to shape it together and find maybe a new avenue to explore that common thing that people have seen before. So what it came down to is he was just the most right dude for the part.”
While Xbox, Activision and Infinity Ward prepare for the launch of “Modern Warfare 4” on Oct. 23 (early access begins Oct. 16), Taylor Sheridan and director Peter Berg are prepping their “Call of Duty” movie for Paramount Pictures. The film is set to take place in the “Modern Warfare” universe, but Negas says he is not sure about whether that means there will be crossover between the “Modern Warfare 4” voice cast and the film’s actors.
“That’s a great question,” Negas says. “Unfortunately, for answering the question, I’m pretty removed from all things ‘Call of Duty’ movie. But I think the simplest answer is whenever we’re casting, we’re trying to find the person that’s going to be able to best play the role and and have a symbiosis between who the person is and who the character is and so it’s a pretty simple calculus for us.”
Pictured top: Mads Mikkelsen as The Archer in “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4“
