Seven years ago, Luke Dale announced that he was quitting acting, but Kingdom Come developer Warhorse Studios had other plans -- plans for a sequel, where his role was expanded and fleshed out, where he became a possible romance for the protagonist and a key player in the main story. The developer just couldn't tell him until it was time.
"It wasn't sustainable," he explained over a video call, his angled, regal face matching his in-game character, Hans Capon. "I couldn't deal with not waking up every day and having something to do."
Things had fizzled out after his first big job on Kingdom Come: Deliverance and he was bouncing from audition to audition. None of them lit the same fire in him as Warhorse and some were downright insulting. In one audition for a part that mixed acting and modeling, a rude casting agent took things too far.
"She seemed to be one of these people that relishes in people's despair," Dale explained. "She was being mean and edgy with me, and then she went, 'Can you bark? I was like, 'What?' Like, 'Yeah, can you bark like a dog?' I said, 'No. I'm not gonna do that.'"
The entire altercation was being filmed, Dale was embarrassed, and the energy in the room was just off. So he stepped out, and the agent followed him out the door, screaming about being disrespected. "I thought huh, that's rich," Dale said.
He was living in a terrible flat and "desperately depressed" to the point where leaving the career he loved seemed to be his only recourse. He wanted to return eventually, but he needed to find stability first, and this was anything but stable.
While he might share a face with his in-game character, a pampered rich boy who refuses to carry sacks, Dale is no Hans Capon. If anything, his personal story more closely resembles that of the main character, Henry, a blacksmith's son who loses everything and has to carve out a new life.
Dale grew up in Sheffield right next to the soccer grounds. His father delivered Chinese takeout and his mother didn't find her calling until Dale was an adult, running one of the most prolific children's charities in the UK, and being awarded an MBE by King Charles.
He stumbled into his passion at a much younger age.
When he was around 12 years old, he happened to take part in a school play, which he found boring. So he improvised funny lines into it as the teachers looked on in horror and amazement.
"Afterward, the teachers went straight up to my mom, and they were like, 'Look, he's got something. Go hone it,'" Dale said. "So my mom took me to weekly drama classes in Sheffield, and I did that for years until I went to drama school at 18."
A couple of years after he retired from acting, Kingdom Come developer Warhorse finally called him back into the saddle -- except the saddle was invisible and the horse was a lump of wood in their otherwise empty, pristine white motion capture studio.
Dale was 22 when he played the not-so-humble Lord Capon in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a hardcore role-playing game set in 15th-century Bohemia. Almost ten years later, he's just wrapped working on the sequel, a much more ambitious game with a script three million words long and performance-captured cutscenes where the actors donned lycra suits to fully embody their characters.
"It was complete luck," he said. "And now I'm one foot in two camps, so I'm still doing my filmmaking. I'm here in Wales. We're shooting something here, filming, and then I'm auditioning. I've got a couple of agents. So it all worked out well."
Things have a way of working out for Dale. When he did his self-tape audition for the first Kingdom Come, it was originally for the part of the player character. Now it's hard to imagine him as anyone other than Hans, who he's fully embraced as a character, to the point where he streams the game on Twitch to a large audience he jokingly calls his peasants.
The lead role instead went to Tom McKay, who grew up in the Midlands in the UK. There were no actors in his family, but he lived near the birthplace of Shakespeare and found himself fascinated by plays and acting long before he developed enough self-awareness to realize it "wasn't cool" to fanboy ancient playwrights. McKay was scouted by the Royal Shakespeare Company while performing in school.
Like Dale, he auditioned for the part of Henry on a self-tape at home, and the two finally met when filming the first bits of motion capture for the game. Dale was a lapsed gamer and McKay didn't play many video games at all, so the pair were shocked by all the work that went into a project like this, from the writers to the cinematic directors, animators, and localization experts. Most shocking, though, was the impact Kingdom Come had on players.
"After the first game, people started talking to me about their experiences," McKay explained. "It was quite amazing -- they talk openly and personally about personal challenges and the sort of therapeutic element of this game where people really connect with the character. I hadn't expected that at all. That happens a bit in TV and film, which is most of my work, but not to the same extent."
That's partly down to how long people spend playing as, or opposite, these characters -- Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is easily a 100-hour game -- but it's also in the intimacy of video games. When you're playing as Henry and you talk to Hans, there's eye contact as if the character is talking to you. Then there's agency over the character, with players making good and bad decisions on their behalf.
"I think that's the biggest thing about the second game, the element of choice, which is ramped up massively," McKay said. "It's in the player's hands, the whole thing. Therefore, if we're doing our jobs right, and Warhorse is doing its job right in terms of making a great game and a great journey, then it should have that impact on them. But I hadn't -- naively -- anticipated that."
Dale was just as surprised. While he didn't play the first game -- "I'm terrible" -- he did follow along with community reaction, but he was still trying to make a career out of acting back then.
"And also," he said, "I just didn't see it for what it was, which was this big, incredibly important thing for a lot of people."
The first game wouldn't have been made without the support of a fanbase sold on its concept, craving this kind of historical and grounded setting in an RPG, which should have been obvious to any publisher who's heard of Assassin's Creed. KCD raised $1,420,320 on Kickstarter. The sequel continues the story and the series has acquired even more fans along the way, with 255,607 people playing simultaneously during launch week on PC storefront Steam -- not counting the thousands more on PlayStation and Xbox.
With that massive audience comes more scrutiny, too. While the vast majority of players love the game, which has over 52,000 reviews on Steam and a "very positive" overall rating, there's a loud subsection of the audience attacking the game and everyone who worked on it because it features an optional gay romance between Henry and Hans. Dale and McKay just let them scream into the wind while they reminisce about how "technical and funny" those scenes were to record while trying their hardest not to smack into each other's head-mounted cameras "like a pair of stags".
"The best way to deal with that is to ignore it and to just focus on the things that matter," Dale explained. "Why expel energy on the people trying to tear you down when there are 50 times more who are excited and enthusiastic? Give your energy to those people."
"We do have this core fanbase, many of whom started way back with the Kickstarter campaign," McKay added. "There's a real positivity, heart, soul, and intelligence in that group. Warhorse and that community have fostered each other in a way. Inevitably, if you reach a certain point, those conversations will happen. But actually, I think we're protected to some extent, by those people. It's an armor, which -- even though it's grown into this massive animal -- continues to protect us."
One of the ways that "massive animal" manifested was in the scope of the production, which employed performance capture for the first time. Clad in tight suits and with a camera mount strapped to their heads, critical cutscenes were played out on stage, where the actors get across every facial twitch or wave of the arm. But this comes with its challenges.
If you're riding a horse in the game, you're sitting on a log and pretending it's a horse on the stage. If you're in a bath, you're resting against a wooden plank and pretending your arms are floating by your side. There's even footage of the team doing motion capture where one guy is pretending to be a dog. You have to imagine your surroundings, with input from the creatives who understand what the final product looks like.
"It's amazing how quickly you get used to it and don't think it's weird," McKay explained. "There's footage of us swimming, where we start hanging our arms on the side of these chairs. But that's all it needs to be. We don't need to be suspended by some cable or anything like that. It's gonna look the same."
The increase in scope was obvious in that massive three-million-word script, which dared to delve into much darker territory than the first game while still making players laugh. When they flew out to read it with the developers -- only for the main quests -- each was given a notebook to annotate and prepare for their roles. By three hours in, Dale had stopped taking notes. McKay still has his and it's almost full. The whole thing took a day and a half to read through together.
"There's a man who deserves a shout-out," McKay said. "It seems unfair to shout out anybody because it takes an army, but John Comer, an Irish man who speaks fluent Czech, has such a unique and brilliant skill. Besides just being a brilliant writer, because he speaks Czech so brilliantly, he can translate the idioms into English in a way that is really, really fluid."
Comer is responsible for such charming turns of phrase as "Are you pulling my pizzle?", taking the spirit of the original Czech script and making sure it's funny in English. Whenever Dale and McKay were in the VO booth and a line didn't quite work, the voice directors would call Comer and he'd immediately come up with a perfect replacement.
"It lives or dies on the script, and the script is so good that you get a lot for free," McKay replied when asked about the game's precise comic timing. "It's already such good material, and the scenarios are so hilarious. But the dark, dramatic scenes are also excellent."
"They understand humanity," Dale added. "They've got the light and the dark, and both are as important to each other. I'm playing the game right now, and I'm finding that when something dark happens, immediately after it is broken by a funny moment. That's why people love this -- because that's life."
Dale can attest to that. A few years ago he was in a dark place of his own, and it seemed like he wouldn't do what he loved again. Now he's celebrating the sequel's success, which expanded his role and gave him a chance to show off his full range of acting abilities.
It's hard to not hold a mirror up to his journey and that of Hans Capon, who's stripped of his societal sway in a strange land and forced to build back his reputation in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Our experiences inform the kind of person we are, and even if you don't do it consciously, the body and mind keep a score. For Dale, it was a loss of passion reignited by this journey through the second game. For McKay, the story reflects his life with the death of a parent.
"I lost my dad when I was quite young," McKay explained. "I hadn't realized this consciously until some way through the game, but even if you're not doing it consciously, and I'm generally not, all of those things inevitably feed up. The death of a parent is monumental, and a lot of people would have experienced that. Whether you like it or not, that stuff's going to bleed into your performance. I'm not a massive one for mining it deliberately, but everyone gets there in different ways, and I respect anybody who is more method. But for me, I feel it's better to let it kind of bubble through you, rather than sitting and thinking about your dad. It wouldn't be very healthy."
However they got there, McKay and Dale put in two of the best video game performances since Red Dead Redemption 2, perfectly capturing the spirit of the funny, tragic, dark, and dramatic script to flesh out these three-dimensional characters.