Actor behind Shadow of the Erdtree's best character, Igon, didn't know how big Elden Ring was, thought his lines were "incomprehensible," and says Miyazaki was a "mysterious figure"

Igon, a dragon-slaying warrior introduced in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, has quickly become a community favorite, somehow stealing the spotlight despite only making a brief appearance in one small corner of the map. His venomous takedown of the dread dragon Bayle is just that memorable. Amazingly, the actor behind Igon, Richard Charles Lintern, says he never expected to work in games, had no idea how popular Elden Ring is, barely understood his own lines at first, and was simultaneously impressed and bewildered by FromSoftware president and Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki.

Lintern discussed the recording process for Igon in an interview with IGN. Lintern has worked in movies, TV, and theater for over 30 years – he compares the attention to detail put into Elden Ring with some of his Shakespeare performances – but this was his first video game credit. He already knew the basics of video games, but with the response to Igon and Elden Ring, Lintern says “my eyes have been opened.”

Recording Igon was unusual for several reasons, Lintern explains. Firstly, this character was well outside his normal acting range. “Even though I’m an actor and you’re expected to be able to adapt to the character that you are playing, usually that adaptation is from zero to ten, or zero to seven,” Lintern says. “In the case of the character that I played in Elden Ring, it was from 0 to 5,000. He was a long way away. He was either dead, or dying, or recovering.”

When he first read his lines, Lintern felt Igon’s now-iconic ravings were “largely incomprehensible.” At one point he asked if there was a mistake in the script after seeing Igon abruptly flip from triumph to defeat, only for one of the recording staff on hand to explain, “‘It’s a video game, Richard. Sometimes you defeat the beast, and sometimes the beast defeats you. We need both options.'” Lintern says he “hadn’t thought about that.”

Lintern was physically and emotionally exhausted after the recording process, which stretched “seven minutes” worth of lines into “five hours” of recording. “There were a lot of people in there… We were doing lines hundreds of times, literally hundreds,” he says.

Elden Ring DLC spear throw

(Image credit: FromSoftware / Bandai Namco)

Miyazaki was a central figure in all of this – rather, the central figure. “Now, I’m not entirely stupid, but I had not heard of Mr. Miyazaki before,” Lintern recalls. “I didn’t know the game, and I didn’t know the status of the game, and I didn’t know his status. But when I walked into the room, his status was very clear, very clear immediately. Everyone was very friendly, but at the same time, I could see that this was a bigger deal than I’d imagined it was going to be.”

Lintern says “I would perform one of the lines” and then “there would be a quite extensive conversation between Mr. Miyazaki and various other people around him in the room. Largely, I think the way things worked was, one of the other people would then speak to [voice director Adam Chapman], and explain what direction Mr. Miyazaki wanted to move in. But he, the mysterious figure in the center of the room, was very much in control of the entire operation.”

Miyazaki might ask for “a tinge of sorrow, or with a tinge more rage, or slower, or faster, or whatever it happened to be.” Through the entire process, Lintern says he was never once told to tone things down. Instead, the feedback he got was to “explode,” which certainly comes through in Igon’s full-throated curse.

At last filled in on who Igon is, his role in Shadow of the Erdtree, and the community’s fondness for him, Lintern reckons the dragon slayer’s vengeance resonates as “a quest of the soul, a quest of morality, and strength, and pain, and terror, and doom.” And yes, he has seen the memes.