After three Spider-Man games, Insomniac Games is shifting focus with Marvel’s Wolverine. Set in the same universe of Earth-1048, the new title centers the popular character at a time when he’s rolling with Team X rather than the nonexistent X-Men. With Sabretooth, Mystique, and others by his side, Logan’s protecting mutants the only way he knows how: his adamantium claws, healing factor, and the rage to end anyone who gets on his bad side.
Before the PlayStation 5 exclusive’s release, io9 had spoiler-free chats with narrative director Walt Williams and Wolverine’s voice actor Liam McIntyre about joining the project and entering the mutant side of the Marvel universe.
Justin Carter, io9: How’d you come on to join Marvel’s Wolverine, and did you know Insomniac was working on it when you did?
Walt Williams, narrative director: Before there was a hiring call, I was recommended to go for this by Marvel Games’ EP Eric Monacelli. We’d worked together creating marketing material for BioShock at 2K, and sitting together back-to-back for months, we became friends and lived together when the company moved to San Francisco. Around 2020 when he was at Marvel, he texted me saying Insomniac was about to look for a narrative director project. He knew I loved their Spider-Man games, and he vaguely said, “I need you to apply for this, because I believe you’re the person who needs to be the narrative director on this thing.” I didn’t know Insomniac had other superhero plans, but I was intrigued, and slowly started to piece some things together so I could prepare my family for a potential move.
Eric and I are like brothers, and he probably knows me better than anyone else I’ve worked with, so he got me thinking about what it is about Wolverine that he’d think I would be a perfect fit for. I started to explore Logan’s layers and see what I’d connect to as both the hero and person that he has to live with. In the concept phase, I talked to original creative director Bryan Horton and associate narrative director Mary Kenney about their vision for the game and character. We found alignment, and started to work with Marvel on what we felt—canonically and personally—that had to be brought to this story centered around him and the people in his life.
Liam McIntyre, voice actor: I’ve played a lot of PlayStation games, for longer than I care to admit. [laughs] I knew Insomniac through Ratchet & Clank and Resistance, and I loved the Spider-Man games. During auditions, we weren’t told what this would be, but I remember them describing the character as “John with knives for hands,” which felt pretty Wolverine to me.
When I got the part, the team was always so welcoming, and it’s a tie between them and Spartacus for the best I’ve ever worked with. Anything I discussed with them—about the character, ideas I had, or where things were headed—I felt like I was being really heard. It’s always felt like the studio has such a good rapport, and I’ve played the games, but it’s something else to be part of it. You really get an appreciation for what goes into making these things special.
io9: The Spider-Man stories intertwine Peter and Miles’ heroics with their personal struggles. Walt, what did you and the Marvel’s Wolverine writers hone in on for Logan?
Williams: It’s important for mutants to be outsiders, feared, and looked down upon. A looming question we had back in 2020 was how to do that when superpowered people in this world are generally liked. So we settled on the angle of, “What if people don’t know mutants exist yet?,” and they had to be exposed in a way that creates that vital mutant/human relationship.
Jean Grey doesn’t have a secret ID, she’s just a woman out in the world caring for mutants and trying to live without being discovered. But in stories like ours, Logan exists as a soldier sought after because he can deliver and survive damage. He loses himself in war after seemingly endless war against men like Bolivar Trask, who knows about mutants and thinks he’s destined to eradicate them so humanity can be saved.
The violence Logan can deal weighs on him, and he doesn’t know who he is–it’s easy to not know what you want when you don’t know where you came from. There’s a statement on late-stage capitalism in there, and also sadness: he knows there’s a lot of blood on his hands, but he doesn’t know how far back that goes. Logan’s constantly struggling to know if he exists, or if he even should exist, and he retreats and pulls away from this world thinking he doesn’t deserve to be in the world because of the way he protects it.
io9: Stepping outside of comics and other related media that guided your take on Wolverine, what non-Marvel media do you feel influenced you during writing?
Williams: Ooh… thinking back, a lot of my original inspirations were ones baked into the character. I looked to Clint Eastwood’s loner cowboy persona in the Man with No Name trilogy, and read a lot of pulp and crime novels. We think of Wolverine as a man of few words, but in the comics, his internal monologue never shuts up. He’s like a hardboiled detective from the ’50s-’70s, a man constantly narrating his inner emotional place and the dark world that is his life.
Early on, I also looked to instances of people dealing with chronic pain. Things like the mental strain that has on a person, buried trauma and lost memories, and how that could express itself emotionally in someone going through intense heightened situations or moments of calm. Logan’s got a healing factor, but his adamantium skeleton means he lives with chronic pain, and he’s so afraid of emotional damage.
io9: For you, Liam, what went into inhabiting this version of Wolverine that’s distinct to you, but also pulling from decades of history on and off the page?
McIntyre: What I love about Logan is he’s tough and very hurt, but he’s also hopeful and has these very earthy, humanistic qualities of a person. Life’s a struggle for him, he’s always going through it, but I like that about him. There’s something about him that always keeps going, even when he hates himself.
I’ve been enamored with this brash, angry fuzzball since I was a kid, reading his comics and hearing Cal Dodd voice him in the old cartoon. I never thought of him as a costume you put on, and it wasn’t about trying to do a particular “party trick,” like snarling how Hugh Jackman did or wanting the claws go “snikt” the right way. The important thing was me doing the work, taking our script and decades of incredible Wolverine performances and building on the shoulders of giants. A bit like I did with Spartacus, I tried to encapsulate the spirit of this character as best I could the way my body can, and make sure to embody the things you associate with the hero.
io9: How is that achieved, performance-wise? You’ve done performance capture for Gears of War [as JD Fenix] and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order [as Malikos], but those ask very different things of you.
McIntyre: Wolverine has a certain physicality and movement to him, especially when he goes on the attack. I tried to focus on his animalistic nature, bringing things like how he’ll sometimes go quadrupedal, to the fore without making him come off as feral. A lot of the required tech meant I couldn’t do wild swings or leaps without ruining the head camera’s footage, so I thank the stunt team every day that Logan looks as cool as he does—and anything we didn’t catch, the animation team would improve on.
What’s great about Marvel’s Wolverine is how it let me draw on roles I’ve done in the past. Spartacus and other heavily physical roles I did made my physicality and training really integral in bringing that character across. Here, we’ve got the best stunt and animation team I’ve ever met. My double, Seth Austin, performers like Jasiri Booker and Amy Johnston, all these amazing people I worked with day-to-day during production are the ones I really have to give credit to. They gave Logan his physicality and the depth of his movement; in the gameplay trailer, when he sprays the blood off his claws as he’s about to sheathe them? That’s something Seth brought to us, saying Logan’s a samurai in the comics, so we should bring in those parts of his personality.
io9: At the time you’d booked the role, Liam, had the story been locked down completely? Or were you and the actors getting it piece by piece, with changes and edits along the way?
McIntyre: I probably didn’t see the entirety of the full script until halfway through production. Major stuff like the characters, their goals, and how they’d achieve them, are things that we knew. Some of the ways we got there had big and small changes over time, along with a lot of the set pieces and the nuances of the relationships, but it was essential to have the big picture nailed early on so we could build our characters around what was going on.
For games as hefty as this, I understand that writers are required to be nimble. Things like mechanics or level design can change, and that means they’ll have to redesign the story to make things feel right. I admire how hard the writers worked to get this thing dialed in. Sometimes, it took a while to get the scripts, but it was always worth it, and they always kept getting better.
The other actors, by the way, are exceptional. I can’t wait for players to see what we do with the characters here, and I think they performances are out of this world in terms of embodying these iconic characters. Nicole Pacent’s got this cheekiness and brings this great sparkle to Mystique, and I told Bretti [Gipson] I genuinely think he’s the best Sabretooth there’s ever been. He’s a lovely, sweet man, and so terrifyingly convincing when he’s performing.
And Krizia Bajos, who plays Jean, was so giving and full as an actor. She was right there the whole time, giving this deep and nuanced performance. I’m proud to be in this, and in it with them.
Io9: As a comics character, Wolverine has a storied history where he’s survived one wild thing after another. From a writing standpoint, Walt, how’d you balance that ridiculousness with his more grounded aspects?
Williams: I think that Wolverine just can’t help himself. As much as he’d like to walk away and say, “Not my problem,” he’s got a deep awareness of injustice in the world. If no one else gets involved in something, no matter how over-the-top it is, he’s gonna hate himself for getting involved, but do it anyway.
And because he protects the underdog, I think Wolverine’s such a blue-collar character. His ideal life is living in the woods, working as a mechanic or a trucker. It’s why people are drawn to him or Spider-Man: Peter Parker just wants to pay his bills and not have the world shit on him when he goes outside. Logan just wants to do his job, go home, and have a whiskey with someone he loves.
But everything’s constantly piling up on top of them. And what makes Logan so hilarious to me is that he’s the ultimate straight man, and an unfunny guy. He lives in a ridiculous world, and when people ask “Where’s the humor?,” you tell them that Logan’s funny because he’s not. He’ll deadpan react to the most absurd things and just go along with it and do the most unbelievable thing. That can be good drama or beautifully over-the-top, and you find yourself laughing at how he’ll stoneface approach it no matter what it is.
Internally, I’ve compared Logan to Batman. They’re both two comics characters who perfectly walk the line between street-level heroes—they deal with very human, dark traumas out where they live—and then go to space, fight a god, and it won’t change their demeanor. Our story doesn’t make Logan do a Dr. Strangelove, but it does have moments where he’ll do things that surprise players, particularly from where he starts and how things progress.
Marvel’s Wolverine launches Tuesday, September 15 for the PlayStation 5.
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