Before landing the lead role in Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, star Matt Ryan actually thought he was auditioning for a pirate TV show

In a not-so-alternate alternate timeline, actor Matt Ryan may well have ended up playing a growling, sweaty pirate on Black Sails, the improbably stellar 2014 TV series prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Treasure Island. He would’ve been a good fit for it. But in this reality, he instead ended up playing the lead role of a pirate in 2013’s Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, his first and so far only videogame credit.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Ryan said he ended up loving the experience of acting for a game—even though when he auditioned for the role, it was actually masquerading as a show to keep the Assassin’s Creed sequel a secret.

“It was pitched to me via my agent as a pirate TV show,” he remembered. “Amy Hubbard, a great casting director in the UK, got me into the room, and then they liked me. They asked me for a callback, and then they leveled with me. They were like, listen: this is a videogame. They said it was an Assassin’s Creed, and I’d played the first one, so I was like ‘great, that’s a cool game.’ But I didn’t think it was mocap—so when it was mocap, I was over the moon. I get to be the character, in the body, you know?”

Ryan saw “all the seasons in Montreal” as he traveled back and forth from the UK and the Ubisoft studio where Black Flag was being developed. A year later he landed the role of John Constantine for a short-lived TV adaptation of the DC Comics series, which he’s returned to for a number of animated films.

(Image credit: NBC Universal)

It was early into his run as Constantine that Ryan discovered how beloved a character Edward Kenway had become.

“I did my first Comic-Con, and that’s when people would be coming up dressed as Constantine,” he said. “And then there’d be all these Edward Kenways in line. I’d be like, oh, this is great. I knew it was a good game, because I played it, but it was around then that I started getting a sense for the fandom of the character, and seeing the amount of work they put into designing those costumes—some would take a year to build the costume, you know? They’d be coming to me and quoting their favorite lines.

“You know, as an actor, if you do a play, it’s one performance it’s gone, and there is something kind of wonderful about a performance that’s fleeting. And with TV and movies, people watch it once, maybe twice if you’re lucky, so they spend a bit of time with you. But with a videogame, they spend a lot of time with you… It’s been really, really nice after all these years to be invited back to this role, and to feel that this character is as beloved as it is.”

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