That realisation happened to hit at around the same time as military-based video games began to boom in popularity. Toufexis’ tone was perfect for all the tango-downs of that era. Back then, the actor was living back in Montreal, where one of Ubisoft’s major studios is based. “So I started suddenly getting these auditions for games like Rainbow Six,” he remembers. “And then I was suddenly the lead bad guy in Rainbow Six. Or games like Splinter Cell, where I played, not the lead bad guy, one of the main bad guys in Splinter Cell. And then in that whole mix came the audition for Jensen in 2008.”
Like most auditions, Toufexis didn’t know what he was auditioning for when he went for the role in Deus Ex. He had no idea what type of game it was, or who he was playing. The only direction he had was that he was playing some kind of Clint Eastwood-influenced character – a very stoic man with a sense of justice.
“A little too stoic, for my taste, in the first one,” Toufexis says. “So I said, ‘Okay,’ and I just gave it to them. I did the audition, I did their stoic kind of Clint Eastwood thing they wanted, and then a few weeks later I got the call. They said, ‘You got this game, and it’s the lead.’ And I had never done a lead in a game before. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is really cool.’ And I honestly thought it was going to be like a week of work, like my other games had been. And it ended up being four years that I worked on the game.”
His life ended up completely intertwined with Jensen’s. In fact, Megan Reed, Jensen’s girlfriend in Human Revolution, is actually played by Michelle Boback, Toufexis’ wife.
“That was completely coincidental,” he explains. “They didn’t know she was my wife when she auditioned, and she got the role. And she came back saying, ‘I got this role in your game, Megan’. And I’m like, ‘Oh, I think you’re playing my girlfriend!’”
At one point in Human Revolution, Jensen finds out that Megan, presumed dead, is actually alive and has been using his DNA to solve issues with the human body’s auto-immune rejection of augmentations. That morning, in the real world, Toufexis and Boback had been having an argument, as people who live together sometimes do. “And we said, ‘Well, we’re not going to make up, let’s just go in and do it.’,” Toufexis laughs. “And so that fight is us really angry at each other, for other reasons, but fighting in the game.
“I’m like, ‘Oh man, this game is taking over my life, this character,’ which I adored in the end. I love it, I love that I’m completely involved in this game. And when the trailer hit, which was only when we were about halfway through recording, and then I realised, ‘Okay, this might actually be very big.’ And it turned out to be much bigger than I thought. And then when the game released, and was a big – it wasn’t a massive hit, but it was a big cult hit.”
There are many ways in which you can measure what makes an iconic character. One of them is design – most people remember Lara Croft because of her dual pistols and adventure getup, while people remember Jensen for his sharp beard, carbon arms, and frameless shades. But not many people could recite a famous line from Miss Croft, whereas there’s always someone ready to reply “I never asked for this” whenever Toufexis puts out a tweet.
“Yeah, people say that still all the time, which is why I don’t know why we’re not, well, we haven’t started on the new one yet,” Toufexis says. “But you can go look at my Twitter, no matter what I tweet, inevitably somebody is saying, ‘Did you ask for this? I bet you didn’t ask for this.’ It’s the craziest thing, the fact that Jensen got pumped into this top tier of video game characters was very surprising.”
Initially, things went quiet after Human Revolution. Toufexis was still busy working on games such as Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed, but he had no idea if he would ever go back for a Deus Ex sequel. “And then they called me for the sequel,” he recalls. “And it was a great thing to hear because initially – and I don’t know if anybody knows this, I think it’s okay to say this now – initially they were going to make the sequel without Jensen. They were just going to make another Deus Ex game. And from what I remember when I was told, the marketing team said, ‘No, you can’t do that. Jensen has just bumped into this,’ like I said, ‘this discussion of top video game characters ever. You can’t just not make a game without him, when you have him ready to go.’ And they agreed, and they continued the story of Human Revolution. And we worked on that for two years, two and a half years.”
Because Toufexis was so tied to the character at this point, it meant he could make some requests. Rather than asking for a rider with a bowl of specific M&Ms, he asked to do more work. You see, the actor only portrayed Jensen’s voice in Human Revolution while someone else did the motion capture. This was due to technical limitations, with Jensen being 6’2” and the actor being 5’10”, but the developer managed to capture his performance and stretch the results in Mankind Divided, allowing Toufexis to fully inhabit the character.
Another big difference between the two games was how much knowledge Toufexis had. Scenes are usually filmed out of order in video games, so he only had a grasp on the individual pieces as he performed them in Human Revolution. For Mankind Divided, he requested the full story outline, as well as meetings with the rest of the cast and the opportunity to perform together where possible.
“Not only was I more comfortable, but I had this, ‘power’ is a stronger word, but people were deferring to me – ‘Would Jensen say this?’,” Toufexis recalls his time on Mankind Divided. “It was the same overall writer, Mary, who’s amazing, but she had all of these other writers who were writing different missions and different parts of the story, and they would all ask me. ‘Is this good for Jensen? Does Jensen do this?’ So I had all of this leeway, and I don’t know if you noticed, but my Jensen in Mankind Divided is much more laidback and human and realistic than he is in Human Revolution.”
Though much of it is due to these technical limitations and the performance differences between the two games, it makes sense for Jensen’s arc. In Human Revolution, Jensen had his humanity stripped away from him without his consent. Not only was he almost killed, he was reborn as a killing tool. Rather than simply giving him prosthetic limbs, the company he worked for deemed it fit to embed blades into his arms, and shrapnel explosives into his elbows. He wasn’t allowed to simply die – he was turned into a weapon for a corporation. He lost his humanity. Between Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, he found what it means to be human again.
“So if you go watch the performance captured scenes in Mankind Divided, they’re my favourite,” Toufexis says. “Because they’re subtle, they’re realistic, every little movement I’m making is captured. It’s very human, and I love that about it. And it makes it much more engrossing, for me, than when I’m being very stoic and then another actor is capturing my body. Personally I think Human Revolution is the better game, but acting and performance-wise, I like Mankind Divided better.”
One of the things that makes Human Revolution the better game is that it feels like a proper, standalone experience. Mankind Divided feels like the first two acts in a larger story and ends abruptly, cutting Jensen’s story short.
“Yeah, I’m not too ecstatic about that,” Toufexis admits. “What had happened was – and I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes, so I’m going to be vague – we had filmed about two months of an entire game, and it was going to be a completed game, if I remember correctly, and me and a couple other people had a big problem with where the story was going, and it wasn’t working. So they rewrote the entire thing, and they made it much bigger.”
The rewrite happened around two months into recording. Many of the actors and writers weren’t happy with the quality of the script, and the team ended up parting ways with the writer, getting new people in to start from scratch. Obviously this decision had consequences – it’s not cheap to throw away two months of performance capture and development work – so this may have impacted Square Enix’s expectations as well. Of course, this is just speculation.
“I remember even doing performance capture, finishing the day, and then going to the writers, and going, ‘What do you think?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ And I think we all decided, we shouldn’t be saying, ‘Yeah, it’s okay,’ we should be saying, ‘Yeah, that was fucking great.’,” Toufexis recalls. “And we were going to, as far as I know, finish up where we finished up in Mankind Divided, and continue into whatever the next game was going to be. And I don’t think that Mankind Divided shipped their goal in terms of sales that they wanted to hit. So it immediately back-burnered. But I know that they said, I knew we were going to go right into it. In my mind, I had said, ‘Okay, we’re doing this one, and then we’re doing the next one.’ And then suddenly I stopped getting phone calls.”
Both Square Enix and Eidos haven’t explicitly said the sequel is cancelled, but the developer is currently working on a new Marvel Avengers game. Who knows what the plans are once that’s out the door. “But one big fear with this, is that they go, ‘Well, we’re going to start all over.’ And they don’t finish the Jensen trilogy,” Toufexis says. “So I hope they finish it. Personally, it’s not as an actor, about money and things like that, I’m fine, I’m doing other big projects. But as a fan, I want them to finish this game, and I want to bring closure to Jensen. I don’t even care if Jensen becomes a secondary character, as long as they close his story. There’s so much to tell, and there’s so much I know about where they were going, that they could change, but I know about where they were going that I want fans to experience. Nothing was set in stone. But what they told me about what was coming was really exciting. More exciting than Mankind Divided’s story. I remember going, ‘Oh man, God, I can’t wait to do that!’ And then, we still haven’t gotten around to doing it, so, hopefully.
“I’m not disappointed in the ending story-wise, because I know where the story is supposed to go. So I look at it and go, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly where it’s supposed to end.’ What I’m disappointed in, is that we haven’t finished it yet. When we move on, if we ever do finish the story, I don’t think Mankind Divided is going to be the sticking point that it is right now. I think people will go, ‘Oh, that makes sense.’ It’s like, imagine they did Infinity War? And then they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, one day we’ll get to Endgame.’ [laughs] You’re like, ‘Come on!’ That’s kind of how I feel about Mankind Divided. Everyone’s pissed off about it now, and that makes sense, but once we finish it, you’ll see why it ended where it ended. We just have to fucking get on it.”
Speaking to Toufexis, all of this comes across as genuine. He’s not a struggling actor hoping for more work – he’s currently working on an unannounced triple-A, a new IP where he plays the main character in a “complex” storyline, and he’s been busy in television playing a terrifying alien antagonist in The Expanse. It’s just that he wants Jensen’s story to be finished for the fans who tweet him every day, ironically, always asking for it.