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Is any acting gig more contested than James Bond? Each week seems to bring a din of audition speculation so loud that it must be exhausting for the Elordis, Cavills and Dickinsons who are at the centre of it all. But when one of them does finally bag the role, perhaps they should seek the counsel of the actor who has quietly played the part for the last five years: Patrick Gibson. He’s the star of 007 First Light, the video game that has sold 2.7m copies since it was released two weeks ago.
As a computerised Bond, Gibson is the first video game actor to lend both his voice and likeness to the role. With endorsement from both Amazon MGM and previous brand guardians Eon there’s a case to be made that he is the seventh official Bond (and the second Irish one). Not that he knew this when submitting a self-tape to Danish developers IO Interactive. “There was talk of martinis in the audition sides that gave me an inkling,” says Gibson. “Although at that point I didn’t believe there was any way it could be that.”
And when the penny dropped? “It definitely tested my anxiety threshold.”
The key to pushing through that – listen up all you would-be 007s – was to lean into the pressure. “I think the enormity of the idea helped me. It felt so impossible as a dream that I was like, sure, may as well throw my hat in here,” he explains. Once he saw how IOI’s team had shaped the character, it only solidified his resolve. “It felt so quintessentially Bond, that it was almost carrying me along. I went from wanting to portray a character I’d known, to suddenly feeling like I was actually becoming it a little more.”
First Light adds the extra wrinkle of being an origin story. This isn’t new territory for Gibson, who’s best known for playing young Dexter Morgan in serial killer prequel Dexter: Original Sin. But there he had the north star of Michael C Hall’s older killer: glazed stare, sly intonation and terrible haircut. Although Daniel Craig was “his” Bond growing up, Gibson resisted aping any one turn, instead looking for common ground between portrayals. “The most exciting part was stripping away the experiences of the Bonds we’ve met in books and films and being left with the DNA of ‘who is this person?’ What ingredients existed before, that were perhaps nature rather than nurture?”
The game’s narrative director Martin Emborg definitely seems more invested in pinning down character qualities over a tick-box exercise in nudge-nudge fan-service. “The trappings – the martinis, the one-liners, the tuxedo – very easily get a jokey, tropey quality to them,” he says. “You need to double down on who the character is, and why he’s in situations where those things exist. Taking it seriously is what gives it the gravity that it absolutely needs to land.”
Still, it must have been pretty cool to say “Bond, James Bond”, right? Gibson’s cagey about which signature moments appear in the game – it doesn’t open with the gun barrel stroll, for starters – but agrees with our assessment that outside “To be or not to be” there are few line deliveries more scrutinised. What’s it like waking up, knowing you have to say it that day? “You have to imagine you’ve never heard it before. You remove yourself from the pop culture element and find truth in those moments. These things are organic happenings, rather than winking ‘a-ha’ moments.”
If the legacy wasn’t already challenging enough, there’s the extra layer of technical abstraction that comes with any video game performance. No jet-setting location shoots here. Filming First Light’s several hours of cutscenes required head-mounted cameras, tracking dots all over the face, blinding lights and an unflattering morph suit. “You’re almost literally naked,” says Gibson. “Which acting can feel like, but this takes it to a new degree. And then Martin says”: ‘Look cool and elegant. Action!’”
When we speak Gibson hasn’t yet played the game, nervously trusting that it has come along since early glimpses where “James Bond would walk in made up of boxes and spheres” and he had to keep it to himself that “I wasn’t totally impressed by the graphics”. There’s also the oddness of seeing strangers steer his digital likeness around. “It didn’t really dawn on me until my mate said: ‘I can’t wait to play as you in this game’, and that is the weirdest thing I’ve ever thought about.”
Above all this hangs the question of where Gibson’s performance will eventually sit in the grand scheme of 007. It’s been easy up until this point to treat Bond’s video game adaptations as a geeky offshoot; the buzzier conversation is always around who’ll play the role on film (although Gibson’s First Light co-star Lennie James said film-makers “would be mad” to not consider him for the part). Emborg sees the game as its own, meaningful alternative. “We’ve had the literary Bond. We’ve had the cinematic Bond for 62 years. What we have here is an interactive Bond that exists in its own right.”
Gibson certainly seems to be enjoying the full Bond experience. Seeing his character model for the first time (dapper, no tux). Learning what car he’ll tear around in (an Aston Martin Valhalla). Hearing his theme song (a stonking Lana Del Rey/David Arnold collaboration). For Gibson, these firsts are impossible to rank. “I had to constantly remind myself that I was doing it. It feels both ingrained, but also a world I couldn’t possibly be a part of,” he says. “I think the only way for me to approach it was with ownership, ignoring the canon and taking this reimagined character into this next stage.”
