The Story, and Enduring Legacy, of Resident Evil's Original Live-Action Opening
Greg Smith may look a little bit older now, but the resemblance is still uncanny. There’s the reddish hair, the bushy beard, and the stocky physique. All these years later, the Australian is still the spitting image of S.T.A.R.S (Special Tactics and Rescue Service) Alpha team member Barry Burton, a role he played almost thirty years ago for the original Resident Evil.
In 1995, Smith, along with five other foreigners living in Japan at the time took an acting gig for an upcoming game called, Biohazard. With development already underway, Capcom’s eventual horror classic already had character models and voice actors in place. But Biohazard’s director Shinji Mikami wanted to shoot some additional live-action scenes to bookend the experience and add to its sense of realism. This ask meant hiring a totally new set of actors who already resembled the characters and assembling a crew to shoot on location. The end result led to the now-iconic opening in which S.T.A.R.S Alpha Team arrives in the Arklay Mountains to investigate the whereabouts of the missing Bravo Team, as well as four different endings portraying the remaining survivors’ miraculous escape from the horrors of the Spencer Mansion. For Smith and the other actors, it was just another role; another way to make money while living in Japan. They couldn’t possibly have imagined what happened next.
In the decades following, Resident Evil (the name given to Biohazard in the west) became an extremely successful media franchise, consisting of new games, comics, and various films. Fans online inevitably wanted to know more about the live-action performers who originated the roles on screen, but Capcom never gave the actors’ full names. However, through a ton of hard work, a
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