Celebrity Byte

You had to work out like crazy to do the Wolverine movie.

Yeah. Like a madman. Like I've never worked out before. The working out was intense. I enlisted the help of this guy, who's a natural bodybuilder, for the diet, and he's the one that told me it's 70% diet and 30% training. That's what you need. As hard as I tried, trust me, the more intense was the diet. Every three hours, starting at 3:30 in the morning, I'd wake up and have egg whites and one piece of wheat toast with nothing on it, and then go back to sleep – protein shakes, steamed chicken, steamed vegetables. I suppose it was healthy in one way, but it was bland.

Are you a comic book fan at all? Did you ever read X-Men or Wolverine as a kid?

I hate to say it, I never heard of it as a kid. The cartoon wasn't out -- I mainly watched cartoons as a kid. I wasn't really into comic books, and neither were my brothers, so I wasn't really brought up with that. I don't know how big they were in Australia at the time, but no one I knew read them either. So it was interesting to discover, and now I'm into it –- I read them a lot, not only for the films, but I get sent them and I'll quite often read them. And now I find myself reading them with my son as well.

So when you started the movie back in ’99 or so, that was your first exposure to it?

Yeah. I had no idea. There was a pub band in Sydney, called the "Uncanny X-Men," obviously it was named after that, but I thought they wanted me to audition for Brian Mannix [lead singer of the band] – anyway, it was the first I knew about it.

I wanted the videogame to be as true to the character as I could, for the movie, and make it an experience that I think fans wanted.

So what has your exposure to video games been? Are you much of a gamer, or do you play games generally?

You know, when I was a kid, for me, it was Galaga, Space Invaders, Pac-Man – that was my vintage, and I used to play them whenever I could afford to. I’m not much into games now, and my son is not into it that much, so I thought I’d get into it with him, but… I did try to play the last X-Men game. I kept getting my ass kicked on that. It was just too much for my ego to see Wolverine going down within seconds, you know?

What was your involvement in the upcoming Wolverine game? Was it just voiceover, or did you do any motion-capture?

There was no motion-capture but I did a lot of voiceover. I did more voiceover for this than I’ve ever done before. The story line follows, very vaguely, the movie storyline, but it actually goes beyond that as well. And of course for a game, you have to have various numbers of outcomes along the whole way, so we worked on it for over a year. I was very involved with it. I wanted the videogame to be as true to the character as I could, for the movie, and make it an experience that I think fans wanted.

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