Kingdom Come: Deliverance II - Nine Years of Acting

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The BBC spoke with the Kingdom Come: Deliverance actors Tom McKay and Luke Dale:

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Nine years and 3 million words of script: Acting in a video game epic

You'll often hear about actors and the role of a lifetime, but for Tom McKay and Luke Dale it's especially relevant.

For the past nine years they've dedicated most of their working lives to two video games - Kingdom Come: Deliverance (KCD) and its sequel.

Added together, the scripts for the role-playing epics set in 15th Century Bohemia run to more than three million words, according to their makers.

It's thought that KCD 2, which came out last week, could be the longest single video game script ever written.

Both actors spoke to BBC Newsbeat about what it was like to be part of such a huge project and working with the game's controversial director.

The original KCD was something of a slow-burn sleeper hit. Its review scores were respectable when it released in 2018 but it wasn't universally acclaimed.

However, it found a passionate fanbase in the months and years afterwards and the appetite for a sequel grew.

KCD 2 arrived to positive reviews and sold one million copies within 24 hours of launching.

The sequel follows the story of Tom's character Henry of Skalitz, a blacksmith's son turned knight, and Luke's character, the impulsive Sir Hans Capon.

It's a sprawling, open-ended game that allows players to carve their own path through it.

This means it's possible to find important characters or items outside of the storylines that revolve around them, and the game will respond to these variable possibilities.

That's something the game's developers have to account for, and something that Tom in particular, as the main playable character, needs to act out over and over again with subtle differences each time.

It meant hundreds of hours of studio time and repeat trips to Prague, where developer Warhorse Studios is based.

He says it was "one of the most amazing and unusual acting challenges" he's faced.

"You would kind of go down one channel of a decision and then come halfway back up and go down another one and then maybe all the way back up to the beginning and back down," he says.

"And that's not an acting challenge that you ever would have in TV or film."

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