“When you do something, you never know quite what it’s going to become.” For Matt Ryan, the performer behind Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced anti-hero Edward Kenway, that rings particularly true. Much has changed since he first started working on the role 15 years ago; Ubisoft’s fortunes, the role of the mocap performer, and the Assassin’s Creed series itself have all been transformed. But, in spite of that change, Ryan is clearly thrilled to be returning to the Caribbean.
Ryan’s own journey to Resynced hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing. The long-rumored Black Flag remake was, by Ubisoft’s own admission, its “worst-kept secret” – a secret that Ryan himself had inadvertently helped to spread when he was caught on a mic at a convention hinting at some kind of return for Edward on the horizon. When I ask him how pleased he is to finally have Resynced out in the open, he can do little more than laugh: “It’s great to have it out.”
Big Preview
This month, we’re shipshape and ready to cruise the gaming seas with our Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Big Preview, which will be updating throughout the week ahead.
Even the alleged threat of legal action seems to have done little to dampen Ryan’s enthusiasm for Black Flag or Edward Kenway, an attitude shaped in no small part by the game’s community: “The reception the character got from the fans has been amazing over the years, and getting to come back, I feel really humbled, and grateful. I feel really lucky that we’ve returned, and that they chose this game.”
Hoist sails
Ubisoft’s return to Black Flag owes much to its enduring fan-favorite status. Certainly one of the most beloved games to come out of the series’ ‘classic’ era, its success hinges in no small part on Edward’s ability to up-end the Creed, something that’s far from lost on Ryan.
“He starts off as someone from a small province who’s wanting a better life, who’s willing to do anything to get that,” he says, suggesting that Kenway’s arc over the course of the game is a huge part of what continues to draw people to Black Flag. “He loses a lot of people around him, and his moral compass doesn’t come into the game until about two thirds of the way through. You get to go on that journey with him, and [have] that realization that actually, the person he was seeking to be doesn’t lie in the place he was seeking it. I love that about the journey of the character.”
That journey is a complex one, but Ryan says he had no difficulty returning to it. “It’s a little bit like riding a bike,” he explains. “You just have to shuffle around a little bit and find where [the character] is.” 15 years on, he acknowledges that “there were some small adjustments I had to make, my voice is a little bit deeper,” but points out that the original recording was a lengthy process: “I’d fly into Montreal, we’d shoot for a week, then I’d go away, they’d do all the technical work, then I’d come back to another bit. That was over a long period of time, so you get to know [Edward] quite well.” Ryan says that getting back into the world of the character for Resynced was as simple as loading Black Flag back up: “To tune back into it, I just played the game.”
But getting his sea legs back wasn’t just a case of Ryan revisiting old scenes. There’s plenty of new narrative content in Resynced that he says “adds more depth” to Edward’s character. I ask him about lead Black Flag writer Darby McDevitt’s claim that one of the new scenes is “now a top five favorite”, and Ryan’s response is emphatic: “I really am seeing that. Those scenes that he wrote are in my top scenes that I’ve played as Kenway.” Key to that, he says, is the performance of one actor behind a “great new character.” While Ryan doesn’t reveal exactly who he’s talking about, he says he was blown away: “I was like ‘this character is awesome’. And the actor who played it, it was like ‘I don’t have to do anything. I’ve just been listening to this guy and reacting. He was so good.”
Since first bringing Edward Kenway to life, Ryan’s acting work has focused on TV, but he’s quick to both espouse the virtues of video game acting and state his desire to return to mocap. Wasting little time in praising Troy Baker as “one of the best in the industry,” he says that performance capture is “a wonderful medium to work in,” and points out how the term ‘voice actor’ is often a misnomer: “You’re lending your whole body to it, and all of your facial expression, every single part of you. You have a lot of freedom with that.”
In the intervening decade and a half since Edward first pulled on his stolen Assassin’s garb, Ryan’s most notable work has been in portraying John Constantine across a whole suite of DC Comics projects, but his fondness for Kenway and Black Flag as a whole is palpable.
“As an actor, I believe you serve the writing, you serve the vision of the director or the character,” he says. “You have to trust in it, you have to be bold, you have to be brave, and you believe in the vision of the creators.” That vision has clearly been adapted a little for Resynced, but Ryan’s belief in its unwavering: “Playing the game today, I’m going from the beginning, I’m having all these memories come back to me of playing those scenes back then, and these flashes of moments, and it becomes quite nostalgic and a little bit emotional. It’s wonderful that we’re back here doing this again, and that we’ve got to bring more of this character to the audience.”
Our Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced Big Preview will keep diving deep into the seas of this revival in the week ahead! Can’t wait? Check out our best Assassin’s Creed games ranking for what to play right now.
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