The May 2010 print edition of Game Informer Magazine has a three-page feature on Nolan North, which includes an interview where he discusses “his rise to prominence in video games.”
North also responds to criticisms that he’s “overused,” particularly in regards to his “Nathan Drake” character from Uncharted. For starters, North says he can’t help how he’s directed.
“There have been a few roles where I….said, ‘this shouldn’t sound like this. Can we do something a little different? Give him an accent or something?’ But they said, ‘No, don’t worry about the voice.'”
North says this concerned him “for a while” and he was hearing reports that there would be backlash from fans because he recorded a series of games where he was basically performing the same voice, and they were all released around the same time.
“I don’t think that will happen again,” says North.
North says Nathan Drake is also his favorite role, but it’s a “whole performance capture” and very close to what North is actually like in real life. “He even walks and runs like me,” North adds. And he was directed to not play the character, but to play himself “in his personality, as though his name were Nathan Drake.”
North has now recorded voices for so many video games that even he doesn’t know how many there have been to date. “Probably over a hundred games. But that’s the great thing about voiceover, I get to play hundreds of characters. Hundreds! Sometimes it’s zombies, sometimes it’s an animal, and sometimes it’s the good guy. I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t want to play the same character my whole career. I’m basically a professional schizophrenic.”
And as a bonus, here’s video from North’s February 1999 guest appearance on GSN’s Match Game:
Related post: 2.01.2010 — Nolan North Has Harsh Critics