If you're the sort of person who just can't get into a role-playing game unless a famous person's voice periodically appears to tell you to do a quest or something, then I have wonderful news: famous actors are in Bethesda's upcoming first-person role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Following in the footsteps of such contemporaries as Patrick Stewart and Liam Neeson, veteran Swedish actor Max Von Sydow headlines Skyrim's cast as both the narrator of the game's most recent trailer, and as Esbern, "a chronicler and agent of the Blades who has survived in hiding." Exactly how much Von Sydow we'll get in the game is currently unknown, but when you get the star of such prestigious films as The Seventh Seal, The Exorcist, and Flash Gordon in your game, one would hope you'd get a fair amount of interaction with him.
Elsewhere in the cast, we have Christopher Plummer, the actor most famous for his role in the brilliant 1987 film adaptation of the TV series Dragnet, but also for other, less famous movies like The Sound of Music, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and the upcoming David Fincher adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Plummer will play Arngeir, "a powerful Greybeard elder" among an "order of philosopher monks."
The last of the big three additions is Joan Allen, the woman you should most certainly recognize as Pamela Landy in the Bourne trilogy, the mom from Face/Off, and the bitch-in-heels warden from the surprisingly great Death Race remake. Allen stars as "Delphine, one of the last remaining members of the Blades – an ancient warrior society once sworn to protect the Emperor."
Other, less famous actors in the cast include Wonder Woman herself, Lynda Carter (who also happens to be married to the head of Bethesda's parent company, Zenimax CEO Robert A. Altman); Babylon 5 star and B-movie queen Claudia Christian; former frequent L.A. Law guest star and voice of Woodhouse on FX's Archer, George Coe; Battlestar: Galactica's Michael Hogan; the woman who played Simone in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (Diane Salinger); Weeds regular Renee Victor; and Czech bad-guy-for-hire (see his work on everything from MacGyver to Angel) Vladimir Kulich.
That's a lot of famous people, but Bethesda still has a long way to go if it wants to match up with the L.A. Noire voice cast, which boasts roughly ten famous people for every minute of gameplay. And as we all know, the number of popular actors contained in a video game is a direct analog to its level of quality. It's science.
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