Update: This article has been slightly amended for clarity in the fourth and fifth paragraphs.
Yesterday, the actor who plays Deacon St. John in Days Gone, Sam Witwer, hosted a pertaining to his work on Sony Bend’s zombie apocalypse game, as we🌸ll as the time he spent voicing Darth Maul in various animated Star Wars series. While most of the questions are about the latter, and the majority of Days Gone enquiries simply refer to people having enjoyed the game, one particular Redditor asked for Witwer’s thoughts on hiring indigenℱous actors for specific roles.
“Why won't studios hire natives when they want voices for characters to speak with an accent?” the commenter asked. In a world where Tr♉oy Baker plays Delsi🌟n Rowe in Infamous Second Son, it’s a valid and important question that more studios should be providing a solution for, especially when you consider that Noah Watts - an actual Native American - played Connor in Assassin’s Creed 3 back in 2012.
“Because casting out of various cities and then flying that talent to LA is cost prohibitive,” Witwer responds. “Also, most people with the most acting experience in the States are either in New York or Los Angeles. If native speakers can be🐽 found, they find it. If not, you get what you get... So there ya go.”
Itꦬ’s worth acknowledging the fact that Witwer mentions California specifically. If we take California as an example and look to the people native🌠 to that region, there were around 720,000 Native Americans living in California as of 2010, as per the offici꧙al . As of the , that number is still over 632,000. Meanwhile, the notes that there are currently over 194,000 American Indian and Alaska Natives in New York state. It's also wor🌄th noting that both states are incredibly cosmopolitan.
Witwer’s assertion that people with acting experience need to be flown out to California and New York is not only misleading, but actively dangerous. “If native speakers can be found, they find it” is a lazy a🦋nswer that dismisses the problem as one of cost, despite the fact that these games have multi-million dollar development budgets. If you can afford an actor, you can afford to cast correctly, regardless of where they're from.
This com▨es in the wake of Days Gone creative director John Garvin blaming the game’s underperformance ꦛon Sony’s desire to cater to “social j🦩ustice warriors.” In the AMA, Witwer regularly praises Garvin and his vision for Day൲s Gone, and at one point goes to bat against critical reception by stating that journalists who didn’t give it a good score didn’t finish the g🦹ame.
“These journalists rush in,” Witwer writes. “They do NOT take their time, they do NOT play the game on the terms the game presents, becaဣuse it is their job to put out an article on a deadline.”
It's worth noting that Witwer's comments aren't explicitly directed at Native American actors in particular, having used native 🐼with a lowercase "n," but the point stands either way. Whether it's a character from Japan, Denmark, Gha♉na, or New Zealand, appropriate casting is important and should never be ignored in favour of a "cost prohibitive" solution.