“Nobody else is going to be Indiana Jones. When I’m gone, he’s gone,” said Harrison Ford shortly after confirming 2023’s Dial Of Destiny would be his swansong. Well, that didn’t last. In new game Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, the whip-cracking hero is voiced by a brand new actor.
- READ MORE: ‘Indiana Jones And The Great Circle’ is a Nazi-bashing adventure worthy of the whiptastic great
Slipping on the legendary fedora is acclaimed video game actor Troy Baker. He’s no stranger to big name roles (he’s voiced Batman, The Joker and Marvel baddie Loki as well as The Last Of Us’ reluctant hero Joel) but taking on Indy was extra daunting. “There’s so much history going into this. There’s so much expectation,” he tells NME during a flying visit to London. “I had to unburden myself from that pretty quickly. If I had stayed underneath the weight of that legacy, I’d never have been able to do it.”
Indiana Jones And The Great Circle is out later this month (December 9) for Xbox and PC, with a PlayStation version due out next year. The game is set shortly after the events of 1981’s Raiders Of The Lost Ark, with Indy out to investigate the legend of The Great Circle, a mysterious force that connects a number of spiritually significant points dotted across the globe, and stop it falling into the hands of fascist powers rising up in Germany and Italy.
The Great Circle is heavily inspired by the movies
The Great Circle takes place between two of the most beloved entries in the series, and the team were nervous about messing up their legacies. Wanting to respect the character’s history, Baker started every day by rewatching Raiders, the first film he ever saw in the cinema (“my parents should not have taken a five-year-old to see that”). On his way to the studio, he’d listen to the iconic John Williams score. Lunch would be eaten to Temple Of Doom. After dinner, he’d settle down to watch The Last Crusade. “I’ve seen them all countless times,” he says.
It was the same for Marios Gavrilis, who plays the villainous Nazi archeologist Emmerich Voss in The Great Circle. “I watched and rewatched every movie,” he explains, paying close attention to Raiders’ Third Reich baddie Major Arnold Toht. “We didn’t reinvent anything. We had to stay in the context of Indiana Jones and everything that’s come before.
It puts its own twist on the franchise too
According to Gavrilis, The Great Circle is a hybrid between the classic Indiana Jones movies and bloodthirsty first-person shooter series Wolfenstein, which was also made by developers MachineGames. “It’s way more intense than any of the films.” But there’s a depth to it that wouldn’t feel out of place on the big screen. “It’s set during the Nazis’ rise to power but I couldn’t just play Voss as the villain. In his world, he’s Indiana Jones. There are moments in the game where the player will agree with him more than they agree with Indy, and that’s the beauty of it.”
“I feel like we did a really good job of putting Indy in situations where you’ve never seen him before,” Baker explains. “The middle of the story is chock full of adventure and everything else we’ve come to love about the character, but there’s something unique about where we start, and where we end up. So you’re going to want to finish the game.“
Baker’s journey was emotionally fraught
Aware of how much responsibility was on his shoulders, Baker threw himself into research mode. But constantly watching those films with a critical eye meant he started to lose touch with what he first fell in love with. “I was turning it into a performance. Instead of asking myself things like ‘why is Indy so confident in that moment?’, I was getting caught up in how he was standing.”
Things came to a head early on during their second shoot in Stockholm, Sweden. “The weight of everything really hit me, and I got upset on stage.” With the cast all watching him lose his composure, the vibe shifted on set.
That evening, horror icon Tony Todd (who plays the mysterious giant Locus) sat Baker down at the hotel bar and they spoke about the importance of letting go and having fun. “You have to allow [a character] like Indy to breathe. You can’t put him under a microscope,” Baker says today. It was less ‘what does Troy think he should be doing in this situation’ and more ‘what would Indy do’. “He never goes in with a plan, he’s just playing jazz the entire time…so I did the same.”
“I stopped trying to convince [the player] that I’m Indiana Jones and started focusing on making [them] believe that [they are] Indiana Jones,” explains Baker. Sadly, Todd passed away last month. “I really wish he was still with us because he deserved to see the fruition of all his hard work.”
He didn’t even want the job at first
“The three roles I’ve turned down have been the three that have been the most life-changing,” says Baker, who originally said no to being Joel in The Last Of Us, The Joker in Batman: Arkham Origins and Indiana Jones in The Great Circle. “You’d have thought I would have learned to get over my own ego after the first two. Because it is ego. It’s the fear that people are going to find the limit of what I can do.”
“I turned it down because there are people that can do a better Harrison Ford impression than me,” continues Baker, who grew up loving the character. “It was the first time I ever saw a superhero without a cape. Indiana Jones uses his brain more than he uses his fists. He’s obsessed, he’s passionate and he loves history. Indiana Jones gave me permission to nerd out.
Baker believes he’s become such a timeless hero because “he’s not someone who’s trying to gain wealth or prestige. He believes things deserve to be preserved and kept out of the hands of people who don’t respect them. That same fear and admiration is ultimately why I took on the role,” he admits. “I just wanted Indiana Jones to be in the right hands.”
He hasn’t spoken to Harrison Ford, but Baker hopes he approves
Gavrilis thinks fans are going to “love” Baker’s take on Indy. “Not only does he really resemble Harrison Ford with the way he’s playing it, but you can still feel Troy in that. He nailed it.”
“In the beginning, I was really worried about the comparisons,” says Baker. “Of course, I do sit here now and wonder if he’d be proud but on set, I couldn’t do that. Indiana Jones doesn’t worry about being Indiana Jones.”
Baker’s also been on the other side of things. He voiced Joel in The Last Of Us before Pedro Pascal took on the role for the HBO adaptation. The pair met for the first time on set in Calgary, with Baker playing a cannibal in episode seven. “We did the Spider-Man pointing thing and then hugged. I told him I had so many questions. He said: ‘I have none for you.’ It was such a beautiful, funny moment. Pedro did such an amazing job.”
“He taught me something about Joel and showed me a different side of the character,” Baker says. “I hope I can do the same with this game. I want to show people a version of Indiana Jones they’ve never seen before.”
‘Indiana Jones And The Great Circle’ is out December 9 for Xbox, PC and Game Pass