Igon voice actor Richard Charles Lintern hadn’t heard of Elden Ring or Hidetaka Miyazaki when he went in to record for the game. Based on the amount of material he had to read, he expected to be there for around 40 minutes. He recorded for five hours, plus a follow-up session a week later.
IGN profiled Lintern, discussing his experience acting for the role of Igon and the massive fan response to the character. According to Lintern, it was clear from the moment he walked in that he had underestimated the scale of what was going to be asked of him. He said, “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 his status. But when I walked into the room, his status was very clear, very clear immediately.” Luckily, the voice director Adam Chapman took him under his wing immediately, clarifying what the role would expect from him.
The session demanded many takes of the same lines, often with significant or slight variances on delivery, but always at a high emotional intensity. He said, “[It was] comparable with characters in Shakespeare that I’ve played and stuff. People were taking it extremely seriously.” Despite the careful work and multiple takes that went into his performance, Lintern was not briefed on his character’s role in the game or even exactly what he was fighting. Players can summon Lintern against Bayle, a massive dragon, in an emotional highlight of the DLC. Upon seeing the dragon for the first time during IGN’s interview, Lintern remarked, “How on earth? Do you fight alongside me? How does that work?”
Lintern has worked as a theater actor with the English National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He starred in the BBC series Silent Witness as Thomas Chamberlain and has voice acted for podcast dramas and television documentary. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree was his first video game role.
In other Elden Ring news, a Twitch streamer beat Shadow of the Erdtree with a dance mat, you can now watch “Let Me Solo Her” defeat the expansion’s final boss without taking one hit, and a massive, official, and expensive Elden Ring lore book is set to release soon.