How one British actor landed starring roles in two of 2023’s biggest video games
Ralph Ineson is 2023’s video game “it” guy. The English actor, who’s made a sizable career out of supporting roles across television and film, managed to nab leading roles in two of this year’s biggest games,Diablo IV and Final Fantasy XVI.
The games released within two weeks of each other, and Ineson is front and center for both of them, playing the gravelly voiced Lorath in Diablo IV and the equally gravelly voiced Cid in Final Fantasy XVI. Eagle-eared listeners noticed the overlap immediately, wondering how he managed to score roles in back-to-back summer gaming blockbusters.
In an interview with The Verge, Ineson told me the story.
Ineson’s done a little bit of everything one can do as an actor. He studied theater in college, worked as a drama teacher for a few years, and started acting in earnest in the mid-’90s. He was in the British version of The Office, had small roles in The IT Crowd and Coronation Street, and played a Death Eater in the Harry Potter films before he got his big break.
“I’d been plugging away, and about eight years ago, I got a big boost in my career when Robert Eggers cast me in The Witch,” he said. “It was my first kind of leading role and the first part I’d had where I could show off a bit as it were.”
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Ineson credited his role in The Witch as well as his impossibly hard-to-miss voice as the reasons why he was sought out for Diablo andFinal Fantasy. In speaking with Ineson, I was shocked to hear that the deep, warm, purring rumble that emanates from both Cid and Lorath isn’t an affectation he puts on when acting — it’s just how he talks.
“I always had a very deep voice. I got it from my grandmother, a really big woman from Liverpool,” he said. “When I was a kid, people would turn
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