Richard Charles Lintern remembers what it was like to meet Hidetaka Miyazaki. Though he had never heard of the man until the day he recorded his voice role in Elden Ring, the game director made one heck of an impression:
“I walked in the [recording studio], and there were at least 12 or 15 people in the room,” Lintern recalls. “Mr. [Hidetaka] Miyazaki was there. So we shook hands, but he largely didn’t communicate with me in English. Other people did…a man called Adam Chapman, who was the voice director on the piece for me, works with a company called Fire Poets – I want to sing his praises just for a moment or two, because it’s quite intimidating when you walk into that room and there is clearly a god of the gaming world there.
“Now, I’m not entirely stupid, but I had not heard of Mr. Miyazaki before. I didn’t know the game, and I didn’t know the status of the game, and I didn’t know his status. But when I walked into the room, his status was very clear, very clear immediately. Everyone was very friendly, but at the same time, I could see that this was a bigger deal than I’d imagined it was going to be. And Adam, to his immense credit, took me under his wing and said, ‘Look, this is what they’re going to look for. This is what you need to do. Be open to moving in different ways with the character. No one’s quite sure what they’re going to end up with, but it’s a journey that we go on together.’”
Lintern was there to record the role of Igon, a new character added in Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree who’s become a beloved community icon thanks to Lintern’s performance. Specifically, everyone loves a monologue he delivers when summoned to aid the player in the fight against Bayle the Dragon, an absolutely massive beast who Igon utterly loathes.
“CURSE YOU, BAYLE!” the monologue begins. “I hereby vow! You will rue this day! Behold, a true drake warrior! And I, Igon! Your fears made flesh! Solid of scale you might be, foul dragon, but I will riddle with holes your rotten hide! With a hail of harpoons! With every last drop of my being!”
While the Elden Ring community has made dozens of memes of Igon, Bayle, and the above monologue, until I spoke to him last week, Lintern was largely unaware of how much the fans adored his performance. In fact, he hadn’t even seen the final cut of his monologue, didn’t know what his character Igon looked like, and had absolutely no clue why he was so pissed off at this Bayle fellow. All he knew was that his experience performing in Shadow of the Erdtree was one of the most intense and unusual roles in his acting career.
From 0 to 5,000
Richard Charles Lintern is an English actor with a robust resume across film, TV, and theatre. He’s perhaps best-known for his work at the English National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and on TV as Thomas Chamberlain in BBC series Silent Witness. He’s also no stranger to voice acting, having taken on numerous roles over the past decade. But Elden Ring was his very first time performing in a video game.
“I had never engaged, or been used, or tried to be used, or even thought of myself as a possibility for use in voice work in the gaming world,” Lintern says. “And once you open that door, it’s been a real revelation for me, actually. I’ve been astonished about how worldwide it is, how enormous it is. I had kind of imagined that the world of TV and film and theater was the largest grossing, or most important, or whatever. And my eyes have been opened, not even by the work on Elden Ring, but by the response to it, and the scope of the reach, and the contact that these stories, these worlds have with people all over the world has been a real revelation for me, and really, really interesting.”
Lintern isn’t clueless about video games, to be clear. He has three sons, and he’s played games with them, including various Star Wars entries, Super Mario, GoldenEye 007, and others. But he tells me he had never really engaged with games where you “disappear into a fantasy universe” until his role in Elden Ring. Lintern says he’s still a bit confused as to why they picked him, saying that he feels his sample clips are a far cry from the work he ended up doing as Igon.
“Even though I’m an actor and you’re expected to be able to adapt to the character that you are playing, usually that adaptation is from zero to ten, or zero to seven,” he says. “In the case of the character that I played in Elden Ring, it was from naught to 5,000. He was a long way away. He was either dead, or dying, or recovering.”
When Lintern first received his lines for Igon, he says they were “largely incomprehensible” to him. He understood that his character was in pain, and kept threatening someone named Bayle, but that was it.
“Largely with voice work, the characterization, or the work is done on the day in the studio,” he says. “If I’m doing a documentary voice, I will have a conversation with the producer. Someone will say, ‘Well, we need a voice with gravitas,’ or, ‘We need a voice with a little bit of sympathy,’ or a smile, or whatever it happens to be. But that work is largely done on the day. There’s not much you can do prior to the actual meeting, other than turn up on the day sober and in good health, basically. And then you get on with it.”
In that regard Lintern’s work as Igon started off completely normal. But his day in the recording studio was anything but.
Exploding Into Elden Ring
Given the very, very small number of lines Igon has in Elden Ring, Lintern expected his recording session, taking place at a studio in Central London, to be short, maybe 40 minutes. It was not. He recalls being in the booth for maybe five or six hours, and that he had to return a week later to a follow-up session. “It was epic in there.”
“I would perform one of the lines,” he recalls. “And then there would be a quite extensive conversation between Mr. Miyazaki and various other people around him in the room. Largely, I think the way things worked was, one of the other people would then speak to Adam, and explain what direction Mr. Miyazaki wanted to move in. But he, the mysterious figure in the center of the room, was very much in control of the entire operation.
“I remember thinking when I left, A, I’m exhausted. That’s never happened to me before. I’m absolutely, my voice is wrecked and I’m physically exhausted, and I’m emotionally exhausted as well. B, that was quite an experience. There were a lot of people in there…We were doing lines hundreds of times, literally hundreds, because if I was there for five hours, the actual total amount of lines that I spoke, I could’ve done in seven minutes.”
For Lintern, Elden Ring was an “eye-opening” experience, one that’s led him to appreciate the emotional possibilities offered by video game stories. But even though he went through a wide gamut of different types of expression, he notes that never once was he asked to bring his emotional levels back down, or temper or mute them in any way. He says every single note he received in that five hours was along the lines of “Do you have more? Can you explode?”
“I’m standing there with my arms outstretched,” he recalls. “And I think at the time, I don’t think I even knew that Bayle was a dragon. I think I might’ve thought Bayle was a person. Anyway, I can’t remember, but I’m giving it as much as I possibly can, vocally, emotionally, neck stretching, vocal cords ripping, everything. And then we would come back, and then there’d be silence again, during which I’d have a glass of water. And then we’d come and do it again with a tinge of sorrow, or with a tinge more rage, or slower, or faster, or whatever it happened to be.
“The attention to detail that was given to the character and the performance was pretty much greater than anything I’ve experienced before,” he adds. “Comparable with characters in Shakespeare that I’ve played and stuff. People were taking it extremely seriously.”
Too Angry to Die
At this point in our interview, Lintern asked me to explain his character to him – who he was, and how the player interacted with him. I explained that Igon is an NPC the player meets by a roadside who is clearly in great agony when he’s encountered. Unfortunately, there’s not much the player can do about Igon’s pain.
“You can’t heal me? You can’t give me water?” Lintern asks.
Sorry, Mr. Lintern, no.
In subsequent encounters it becomes clear that Igon is absolutely furious with a character named Bayle. The player will eventually learn from other sources that Bayle is a massive dragon – and not just any dragon, he’s widely regarded as the absolute worst dragon, one that even other dragons loathe. Igon, a guy who kills dragons and eats their hearts for a living, really wants to eat Bayle’s heart. But when we meet him, he’s already tried and failed, with Bayle leaving him injured, agonized, and near-dead. When Igon sees the player is capable of killing dragons, he throws in his lot with them in hopes of getting revenge. It’s basically Captain Ahab and Moby Dick, with Igon’s monologue giving off big “From hell’s heart I stab at thee” energy. Igon even uses a harpoon in battle! Lintern appreciates the comparison.
“A quest of the soul, a quest of morality, and strength, and pain, and terror, and doom,” he observes. “And an enemy that is so huge that you can’t even comprehend it, but for some reason, the bravery of the individual comes through and manages to triumph over it.
An enemy that is so huge that you can’t even comprehend it, but the bravery of the individual comes through and manages to triumph.
“Or, this is the other thing. I remember feeling rather foolish at one point, about an hour or two in, there was one line where I said something like, ‘You are defeated. I triumph over you.’ And then the next line on the piece of paper was, ‘So you have defeated me.’ And I remember saying something like, ‘I think there’s a mistake on the script thing here, because one minute he wins and the next minute he loses.’ And there was this awkward pause on the other side of the screen. And eventually, someone came back to me saying, ‘It’s a video game, Richard. Sometimes you defeat the beast, and sometimes the beast defeats you. We need both options.’ I hadn’t thought about that.”
I eventually show him images of Igon (“I look like a kind of broken down, scarecrow kind of guy.”) and the enormous Bayle. Bayle elicits quite the reaction from Lintern: “How on earth? Do you fight alongside me? How does that work?” I explain Elden Ring’s boss fights and its summon system that allows us to fight alongside Igon, but Lintern remains impressed anyone can beat such a massive dragon even with Igon and all his harpoons at their side.
I can’t help myself – I show Lintern a couple memes of Igon, including one of my absolute favorites:
“Man literally too angry to die,” he reads. “Is that me? That’s genius.”
I’m not the only one who’s been showing Lintern Igon memes. He tells me his son keeps sending references and asking him what “Curse you, Bayle,” means, but up until now Lintern hasn’t had a helpful answer. Lintern tells me he knows better than to name search himself online, but between his agent and his son, he’s seen enough positive feedback to know his role was well-received. And he’s certainly up for more video game roles in the future, he says, even if the intensity level is similarly dialed up to 5,000.
“I remember thinking for quite a few days afterwards, ‘That was quite an intense experience,’” Lintern concludes. “It was very mysterious. Mr. Miyazaki was a very mysterious character, but it was enjoyable. It felt creative, and it felt engaged. And I didn’t quite know what I was doing, but I knew that I’d had fun doing it. Put it that way.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
