With the game launching last week and already looking like a success, one of its main actors had a genuinely difficult time staying quiet.
Games love finding ways to turn the Moon into a threat, or at least convince players that it is one, and while we loved Pragmata, it only gave us more lunar trauma. David Menkin, who plays Hugh, has always adored that giant grey rock, but as he explained in an interview with Polygon, working on Capcom’s shooter meant keeping his excitement about the Artemis 2 mission under wraps. It was not that the embargo explicitly forbade him from talking about the Moon. He simply wanted to post about the strange coincidence that the release dates of Artemis 2 and Pragmata ended up so close together.
The whole web of embargoes and restrictions was so tangled, and Menkin considers himself such a terrible liar, that he decided the safest option was to shut himself down completely so that no confidential detail could slip out by accident. He said he did not want someone at Capcom asking him, “Excuse me, is this a picture of the moon, or our moon?” Menkin also has a long history with astronaut-adjacent roles. He has played Luke Skywalker in Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, Neil Armstrong in the short film Moths to Flame, and appeared in an audio drama about Buzz Aldrin. He has recited Neil’s famous quotes, he knows an absurd amount about the damn Moon, and he even went as far as to say that his whole career has somehow revolved around it.
He also talked about how the dynamic between Hugh and Diana was built. The process began with a table read, but David Menkin and Grace Saif, who plays Diana, did not record together. Instead, they recorded in separate locations and performed scenes against the other actor’s previous takes. At one point Saif was ahead of him in the recording process, and Menkin made sure he never caught up, which meant he could always react to her performance. He told Polygon that the experience felt a bit like acting opposite a CGI character in a live-action movie, but he also praised everyone involved for managing to make that system work.
Menkin also says he does not really have any transferable skills. Acting is simply the thing he knows how to do, and he is grateful that there are people around him who make him feel safe enough to do it. In the end, somehow, everything comes together and works.
Leave a Reply