10 Actors Who Gave Unforgettable Performances in Modern AAA Games

Video games have become one of the most important places for screen actors to do serious work. The biggest titles are made like prestige productions: months of performance capture, scripts that run to hundreds of pages, directors who coach actors through scenes and release dates that arrive with the marketing weight of a blockbuster. As a result, performers best known from film and television now appear in games as the emotional center of the story, and sometimes as the reason a player buys the game at all. With Grand Theft Auto VI arriving on November 19, as our guide to preparing for the GTA VI launch explains, the format has never had a bigger audience.

This list picks ten actors whose work in modern AAA games, meaning big-budget, high-profile releases from major studios, stands out. Some are movie stars who lent their faces and voices to a game, while others are career game performers who became household names through a single role. They are presented in the order in which the games that made the case were released, from 2013 to 2025, so the list also works as a short history of how acting in games has changed.

How Actors Work in Modern Games: Voice, Motion Capture and Likeness

Before the list, it helps to understand what these actors actually do. In a voice role, the performer records dialogue in a booth. In performance capture, the actor wears a suit and facial markers while cameras record their body, face and voice together, so that a digital character moves the way the actor moves. Studios may also scan an actor’s face to build a digital likeness. The Game Awards define its Best Performance category as an award for voice-over acting, motion and performance capture, which reflects how blended the craft has become.

Several of the actors below did all three. Giancarlo Esposito worked in a full capture suit for Far Cry 6, Norman Reedus provided voice and motion capture for Sam Porter Bridges, and Tony Todd began motion capture for Venom more than a year before the game launched. The skills overlap with directing for screen, which our guide to how to film, direct and produce your own movie covers in the context of working with actors on set. The craft is also at the center of a larger debate, explored in AI Cannot Act and in our look at how 2026 became the breakout year for AI in cinema.

1. Troy Baker: Joel Miller in The Last of Us

Game: The Last of Us (2013) · Role: Joel Miller · Also seen in: Death Stranding 2, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Few performers have shaped a generation of game characters the way Troy Baker has. As Joel Miller in Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, released in 2013, he played a worn-out survivor escorting a teenage girl across a collapsed America, opposite Ashley Johnson’s Ellie. The game’s power came from the quiet moments between the two, and Baker’s tired, gravelly delivery gave Joel an emotional weight that players had mostly associated with film at the time.

Baker’s range is the reason he opens this list. He voiced Joel again in The Last of Us Part II in 2020, played Sam Drake in Uncharted 4, and returned as the villain Higgs in Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding 2: On the Beach in 2025. In December 2024 he took on one of the best-known roles in adventure fiction, playing Indiana Jones in MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, a performance that asked him to evoke an established screen hero without simply imitating him.

The story he helped define now lives on television as well. HBO’s adaptation is heading into a third season in 2027, which Craig Mazin has planned as the final one, as covered in our report on The Last of Us season 3 and its final-season plan. It is a clear example of how a game performance can set the emotional standard that a later screen version has to meet.

2. Norman Reedus: Sam Porter Bridges in Death Stranding

Game: Death Stranding (2019) and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (2025) · Role: Sam Porter Bridges

Norman Reedus, best known as Daryl Dixon in The Walking Dead, plays Sam Porter Bridges, the courier at the center of Death Stranding. Released on November 8, 2019, it was Hideo Kojima’s first game from his own studio after he left Konami, and its premise of hauling cargo across a ruined America to reconnect isolated cities was unlike anything else in the big-budget space. Reedus provided both the voice and the motion capture for Sam, and the character’s face is built on his likeness.

The partnership predates the game. Reedus and Kojima had been attached to the cancelled Silent Hills project, and their friendship carried over into Death Stranding, where Kojima assembled a cast that read like a film festival jury: Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux, Margaret Qualley and Guillermo del Toro. Seydoux’s film career is the subject of part of our look back at the 2015 Bond film Spectre, in which she played Madeleine Swann.

The sequel, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, arrived on June 26, 2025 with Reedus, Seydoux and Baker returning and newcomers such as Elle Fanning and director George Miller joining the cast. Reedus again handled voice and motion capture. The long-running collaboration shows that a performer who commits to a game’s strange tone can become inseparable from the character.

3. Mads Mikkelsen: Cliff Unger in Death Stranding

Game: Death Stranding (2019) · Role: Cliff Unger

Mads Mikkelsen’s role in Death Stranding is one of the most discussed in the game, partly because of how much of it players only understand late in the story. As Cliff Unger, a pivotal figure in the game’s central mystery, he brought the controlled, unsettling stillness that made him famous on screen. It is a performance built on restraint, and it gave the game a magnetic presence that matched Kojima’s ambitions.

The Danish actor’s film and television résumé explains why Kojima wanted him. Mikkelsen played Hannibal Lecter in the NBC series Hannibal, the Bond villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, the sorcerer Kaecilius in Doctor Strange and the scientist Jürgen Voller in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and he starred in the Oscar-winning Another Round. As Amazon MGM weighs who should take over the 007 role next, as covered in our report on the James Bond casting shortlist, his Casino Royale performance remains a benchmark for the franchise’s villains.

Kojima confirmed before the sequel’s release that Mikkelsen would not return for Death Stranding 2, explaining that Cliff had played such an important and special role in the first game that the character was better left there. It is an unusual and respectful choice in an industry that usually brings back its most popular faces, and it confirms how much weight Mikkelsen’s single appearance carries.

4. Cameron Monaghan: Cal Kestis in Star Wars Jedi

Games: Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (2019) and Survivor (2023) · Role: Cal Kestis

Cameron Monaghan was already a familiar face from the Showtime drama Shameless and the Fox series Gotham, where he played the Joker-like Jerome Valeska, when Respawn Entertainment cast him as Cal Kestis in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in 2019. Cal is a young Jedi Padawan who survived the purge of his order and spends the game hiding from the Empire. Monaghan provided the voice and the performance capture, and his earnest, slightly bruised take on the hero anchored the series.

The sequel, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, arrived on April 28, 2023, and Monaghan’s work earned a nomination for Best Performance at The Game Awards that year, in a field that also included Idris Elba and the eventual winner, Neil Newbon. The story takes place in the shadow of the Empire, a period our Star Wars timeline explained places within the saga’s wider chronology.

In September 2023 Monaghan told an audience at Ocala Comic Con that a third Jedi game was in development, news that Respawn and Electronic Arts had not formally announced at the time. The series was always envisioned as a trilogy, so the confirmation made sense, and it highlights how a lead performer can become the public face of a franchise.

5. Keanu Reeves: Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077

Game: Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) and Phantom Liberty (2023) · Role: Johnny Silverhand

No casting in a modern game generated more attention than Keanu Reeves in Cyberpunk 2077. The reveal came during Microsoft’s E3 2019 press conference, when the actor appeared on stage and announced that he would play Johnny Silverhand, the rebel rockerboy who lives on as a digital engram in the mind of the player character V. According to an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Reeves was first approached about the part in July 2018, well before the world saw the trailer.

The game launched in December 2020 in a troubled state, and Sony removed it from the PlayStation Store from December 2020 until June 2021 while CD Projekt Red repaired it. The studio spent the following years rebuilding trust through patches and the Phantom Liberty expansion in September 2023, in which Reeves returned. Whatever the technical story, Johnny remained the face of the game, and Reeves’s sardonic, wounded performance is a major reason players stayed.

The wider Cyberpunk universe is still expanding. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is streaming on Netflix with ten episodes, and a 2.5 update brings its content into the game, as detailed in our report on Edgerunners 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 update 2.5. Reeves, meanwhile, keeps moving between mediums: Lionsgate has greenlit an animated prequel in which he voices the assassin, as covered in our story on the animated John Wick prequel, and his place in cinema history is explored in our feature on The Matrix Revolutions.

6. Giancarlo Esposito: Antón Castillo in Far Cry 6

Game: Far Cry 6 (2021) · Role: Antón Castillo

Ubisoft’s Far Cry series is known for memorable villains, and Far Cry 6, released on October 7, 2021, built its marketing around a screen actor known for exactly that. Giancarlo Esposito plays Antón Castillo, the dictator of Yara, a fictional Caribbean island nation inspired by Cuba, who is grooming his son Diego to succeed him. Esposito performed in full motion capture, and Ubisoft placed him at the front of its reveal, which showed how much of the game’s identity rested on one performance.

Esposito’s film and television credits made the casting obvious. He played the quietly lethal Gus Fring in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian and Stan Edgar in The Boys. In interviews around the launch he spoke about the challenges of motion capture and about drawing on childhood memories to give Castillo emotional texture. The series has a tradition here: Michael Mando, his Better Call Saul co-star, played the villain Vaas in Far Cry 3.

Playing a charming tyrant is a specific skill, one explored from the film side in our list of 10 iconic Hollywood movies where the villain wins. Esposito’s Castillo works for the same reason those screen villains do: he is calm, persuasive and utterly convinced he is right, which makes the player’s resistance feel earned.

7. Christopher Judge: Kratos in God of War Ragnarök

Game: God of War Ragnarök (2022) · Role: Kratos · Award: Best Performance, The Game Awards 2022

Christopher Judge, best known as the alien warrior Teal’c in Stargate SG-1, became the voice, face and body of Kratos when Santa Monica Studio rebooted God of War in 2018. His work in the 2022 sequel, God of War Ragnarök, released on November 9, 2022, deepened the character from a wrathful Spartan into a father learning to speak openly. Judge’s slow, careful delivery turned silence into drama.

The industry noticed. Judge won Best Performance at The Game Awards in December 2022 and presented the same award to Neil Newbon a year later. The cast around him included Ryan Hurst, who voiced Thor, and Richard Schiff, known from The West Wing, as Odin, along with Sunny Suljic as Kratos’s son Atreus. The ensemble is evidence of how deep the casting bench of a top-tier game has become.

Kratos is now crossing into live action. Prime Video’s God of War series restarted production in Vancouver with Dave Bautista as Kratos after an injury to Hurst, with footage featuring Hurst to be reshot, as covered in our report on the God of War series resuming filming. Bautista has since shown off a 20-pound weight gain on Instagram, as we reported in his Kratos transformation update. Whatever Bautista does, he inherits a character that Judge has made unmistakable.

8. Neil Newbon: Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3

Game: Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023) · Role: Astarion · Award: Best Performance, The Game Awards 2023

Neil Newbon is the least obvious name on this list and one of the most important. Before Baldur’s Gate 3, the British actor was a working performer with credits in games and television, and he has said he was close to quitting acting before landing the part of Astarion, a charming, sardonic vampire spawn companion with a history of trauma. Larian Studios’ role-playing epic, released in 2023, made the character one of the most beloved in the genre.

Newbon won the Golden Joystick award for Best Supporting Performer in November 2023 and then took Best Performance at The Game Awards, where the game also won Game of the Year and four more trophies. The award went to him over a field that included Idris Elba, Cameron Monaghan and Ben Starr. Judge, the previous winner, presented it, and Newbon thanked the game’s community in his speech.

His success reflects something that has long been true on screen too: a great part matters more than a famous name. Our feature No Stars, No Problem looks at films that succeeded without a recognizable face in the cast, and Newbon’s run is the interactive version of that argument. The performance had to work across hundreds of branching choices, and it did so while remaining recognizably one person.

9. Idris Elba: Solomon Reed in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

Game: Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty (2023) · Role: Solomon Reed

When CD Projekt Red announced a spy-thriller expansion for Cyberpunk 2077, it added a second major screen star to the world of Night City. Idris Elba plays Solomon Reed, a sleeper agent for the Federal Intelligence Agency of the New United States of America, who recruits V in the new district of Dogtown to rescue the president. Phantom Liberty launched on September 26, 2023, for $29.99, and it was the only expansion the studio had planned.

Elba, best known for Stringer Bell in The Wire and the title role in Luther, brings a smooth, ambiguous authority that makes Reed hard to read. Keanu Reeves praised him on stage at the Xbox Games Showcase in June 2023, saying it was a pleasure to share the screen with him. The performance earned Elba a nomination for Best Performance at The Game Awards, alongside Cameron Monaghan and Neil Newbon.

Elba is now directing as well as acting. He co-directed and stars in Above the Below, an ocean survival thriller that Lionsgate has set for December 4, as covered in our report on the Above the Below trailer. Seen next to Reeves, the pairing is a reminder that a single expansion can double a game’s star power.

10. Tony Todd: Venom in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2

Game: Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023) · Role: Venom

Tony Todd, the actor behind the horror icon Candyman and the vengeful Death in the Final Destination films, voiced Venom in Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, released in October 2023. The role was announced in September 2021, and Todd began motion capture the following year. His deep, resonant voice turned the symbiote into a menace that was both seductive and terrifying, and the performance earned him a nomination for Performer in a Supporting Role at the British Academy Games Awards.

Games were an important part of Todd’s late career. He voiced the Vortigaunts in Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Half-Life: Alyx and Admiral Tommy Briggs in Call of Duty: Black Ops II. He told The Hollywood Reporter in 2024 that Venom was probably the job with the most voice-over sessions he had ever done.

Todd died on November 6, 2024, at age 69. Insomniac Games said it was heartbroken and ended its tribute with, “We are Venom… forever.” His final voice role was in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, in which Troy Baker plays Indy. The wall-crawler’s world keeps expanding across media; Prime Video’s Spider-Noir ended after one season, as we reported when Nicolas Cage reacted to its cancellation.

Why Games and Screens Keep Borrowing From Each Other

Studios cast screen actors because a recognizable performance sells a game and gives its story credibility, and because the best ones bring genuine craft. But the traffic now runs both ways. Games are among the most valuable sources of film and television adaptations, and many of the actors above are now attached to screen versions of the worlds they helped build. God of War is being made for Prime Video, The Last of Us is nearing its final HBO season, and a live-action PUBG series is in development at Netflix with Donald Glover attached, as covered in our report on the Netflix PUBG series.

The slate is long. Our 2026 video game movie release dates rundown covers titles from Resident Evil to Street Fighter, the subject of our article Round Three: Capcom’s Street Fighter Returns to Big Screens. Netflix’s Assassin’s Creed series recently shared a behind-the-scenes set photo as filming nears its end, and the Call of Duty movie is being shaped by director Peter Berg. The stakes are rising too: A24’s Elden Ring movie reportedly costs nearly $200 million.

Games themselves keep reaching into film territory. Walton Goggins has wrapped Fallout season 3 while Bethesda’s Fallout 5 is in preproduction, and a possible new Red Dead Redemption game is the subject of analyst speculation. As the two industries overlap, the line between a game actor and a screen actor keeps fading.

Conclusion: The Performance Is the Point

The ten performers above show the range of what acting in a modern game can be: a movie star introducing a franchise to a new audience, a veteran character actor turning a villain into the story’s center, and a working British actor winning the industry’s top performance award for a role that millions of players adopted as their own. Each had to bring a complete character to a medium where the audience controls the camera, the pace and sometimes the dialogue.

As studios invest more in performance, expect the best game roles to keep drawing the best actors, and expect more of those actors to appear in adaptations of the worlds they helped create. For anyone who wants to see how acting translates, a good way to start is to play one of these games and then watch the same performer in a film.

Frequently Asked Questions About Actors in Modern Games

What is performance capture in video games?

Performance capture records an actor’s body movement, facial expressions and voice at the same time, so that a digital character reproduces the performance. It is used in many AAA games and differs from voice acting, which records only dialogue.

Which actors on this list won Best Performance at The Game Awards?

Christopher Judge won Best Performance in 2022 for Kratos in God of War Ragnarök, and Neil Newbon won it in 2023 for Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3. Idris Elba and Cameron Monaghan were among the 2023 nominees.

Are Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba in the same game?

Yes. Both appear in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, the 2023 expansion, in which Reeves reprises Johnny Silverhand and Elba debuts as Solomon Reed.

Will Mads Mikkelsen appear in Death Stranding 2?

No. Hideo Kojima confirmed that Mikkelsen’s character Cliff would not return for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, saying the role in the first game was important and special.

Do movie stars usually do the motion capture themselves?

Often, but not always. Some, such as Giancarlo Esposito and Norman Reedus, perform in a capture suit, while others provide only their voice and a scanned likeness.