How has the process of recording dialogue for a videogame changed since you worked on Hitman: Codename 47 back in 2000?
It's Americanised, but it's very deliberately not regionalised to a particular place in the United States. We couldn't be like (exaggerated Texan accent) "Hey, y'all!" So the accent had to swim somewhere around the Mid-Atlantic. Because he doesn't, right? He came out of a test tube. With Agent 47, we didn't want it to sound like he comes from anywhere in particular. (Exaggerated upper class English accent) "Hello, I've come here to talk down to you." Europe is getting that way about Britain too, and some parts of Southeast Asia apparently find the accent difficult to understand if it has any kind of regional dialect.
I have this kind of international sound, which is actually very useful, because Americans don't like Brits. I didn't really click to any particular dialect. What about the accent? When you speak normally, your English accent comes through. Chill out for a bit, this is a great club." Yeah, sometimes when I see him in places like the nightclub in Berlin I think: "Just let your hair down! Go and have a nice Long Island iced tea and get on down. Even when he's surrounded by people at some fancy event, you still get the sense he feels alone. I wasn't going against the script or the character, but it gave me something emotional from my own memories to hang the delivery on. But this aspect quietly crept into the character more and more, just in the way I was delivering the lines. Obviously I took all the direction that came my way, because anything helped. "Who am I? Who created me? Where do I come from?" It was a little game I'd play in my own head. To give it a bit of a haunting feeling, like Frankenstein's monster. So that feeling of being on the outside looking in was something I decided I could use to colour Agent 47's dialogue. I'd change schools every year and I'd be the new boy every time. Īs a child, despite having friends and a lot of love at home, I often felt alone. I don't know if my parents were wanted by the police or what. I actually looked to my own upbringing for inspiration, which was very fragmentary. But I thought we had to have some human aspect to this emotionless, laboratory-created killer. This character could easily sound dull to the ear, like he's unplugged and not feeling anything. It was a tricky job, for IO and for myself. Don't do it half-assed, as they say, and hope for the best. I've learned over the years that it's always good to commit to an approach. (In Agent 47's voice) "I walked into the room and the door was ajar." That kind of dry, deadpan delivery. I decided on a kind of Philip Marlowe detective thing. And it helped that the character was bald! So I gave the voice a crack, although the part wasn't mine. And straight away I was like, wow, I love this. I was looking at the footage, a scene in Hong Kong, and it was all dark and shadowy and very Blade Runner. They interrupted my session and said "Hey, David, when you're finished, would you mind coming and looking at this new game we're working on? We need a voice!"Īnd it was a no brainer. I was doing a voiceover in a studio in the same building where IO was doing the graphics for the very first Hitman game. Being in the right place at the right time. It was kind of a serendipity moment, really.
#Hitman 2 silent assassin voice actor Pc
PC Gamer: How did you land the role of Agent 47?ĭavid Bateson: I'd love to say it was an audition between me and three thousand other people, and I fought them all off.
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