It’s best if we start with short introductions and a bit of information regarding what got you to this point.
Michael Antonakos: My name is Michael Antonakos and I play Alexios in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. I was born in Athens and I moved to Canada when I was about three years old. My father moved back to Greece when I was about six, so I continued to come back to Greece during the summers throughout my youth and my teenage years and I guess I feel that I’ve had the opportunity to feel connected to Greece. Growing up as a kid
—35s—
in school plays and then I continued to perform at the Rocky Mountain Shakespear Company into my early teens. My mum was a choreographer and her sister was an opera singer so I’ve kind of delved into a little bit dance and singing and then that got me into musical theatre. After, I left school, university for threatre, I moved to Vancouver
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Melissanthe Mahut: I wanted something to do with cinema, I wanted something to do with acting so I enrolled in the National Drama School of Greece, then I spent three years at the Royal Academy Of Dramatic Arts in London and after that I came back to Greece, I did a few jobs here, taught English, did a lot of translating work on the side and this came up literally out of nowhere. I had done a bit of work on Assassin’s Creed Origins, a few characters in Origins and my agent calls me up one day and says basically “they would like to see you for another project that they’re developing” and three auditions later, one in Athens, one in London and one in Quebec…
Michael Antonakos: …That’s where we met.
Melissanthe Mahut: Which is where we met, we met in Quebec.
And now you’re here.
Melissanthe Mahut: Thank you [speaking to Michael] though for I wouldn’t have done it without him. Yeah, basically we ended up on this great project together.
During the launch event you mentioned that your theatrical studies in London proved more useful for this kid of job, compared to your initial theatrical studies here in Athens.
Melissanthe Mahut: I guess in a way you could say both were very useful in that they taught two very different types of approach to acting in general, so I’m not dissing the Greek drama school education in that respect. Basically what I’m saying is there was no focus on actual voice work. In London we had the opportunity, we had a lesson for voice acting, they would call it sight reading at the time. So it was basically approaching text, trying to decode text very fast and being able to portray as much as we possibly could in the voice within a very short period of time and we went on to do some radio plays, there were some competition with the BBC I think.
We’re not trying to talk you into dissing any of the two. We just suspected ourselves that it stands to reason for your London studies to be fruitful in this regard as it’s a cultural thing, as they do way more radio dramas.
Melissanthe Mahut: Yeah, obviously. And the reason I’m saying the Greek education that I had also helped and contributed in terms of how they also teach you how to act is very different and I’m saying that it worked accumulatively but, at the end, in London, because of the fact that you just mentioned, that they have the whole culture to support it, it was much easier to practice and to flex that muscle.
What would you say was the weirdest part of this experience? Maybe something in the whole process that you didn’t expect to be weird in any way and surprised you by being so.
Michael Antonakos: We had to copy each other’s performances in the game which is something I’d never really done before and it’s unique thing as actors create one character for two different versions of it, and one’s a female and one’s male, and to work with an actor to help establish who this character is, whether it’s male or female, you have to sort of both agree on, you know, an idea of who that person is. And the find a balance between the sexes. Because if it comes from a man it can be different, if it comes from a woman it can be different. We worked on finding this balance between masculine and feminine for everything we did. That was a really neat experience and working together on that was really, really special. We got along very well and we were both willing to contribute and willing to be open and take critiques from each other to help get the best performance. It’s weird thing to have to watch someone and then go like, OK, and give them a note and hope they don’t get their ego affected by it and they get up and do it again and then you have to step up and sort of do your own version but the same way that they did. That was really neat. It was weird. It was very weird. But we did it very well.
Melissanthe Mahut: Yeah, I mean, I think what was weird about it was the fact that in and of itself, basically, you know, we had to do that but how we ended up doing it and how it turned out was not at all. But the fact that it was the prerequisite was the weird element, I think.
Michael Antonakos: Like we had to hit the same timing, the same blocking, moments, everything had to, the acting had to match, because they’re creating all the shots and everything to be the same and we had to fill it in.
Melissanthe Mahut: Even the second, I mean, everything had to be timed so that, you know, we would hit, you know, the same line at the same spot and in same location, you know, it was interesting to approach.
Michael Antonakos: We expected it to take many takes to get there. And I think everyone did.
Melissanthe Mahut: Yeah, we did didn’t we?
Michael Antonakos: We all expected it would take many takes to do it but, for some reason, I think it was because we did a lot, you and I prepped a lot before we got to rolling action on the day. We did do homework all the time together and so we sometimes got it in one take and the majority was two takes and pushing it sometimes was three and it was fascinating because everyone was always surprised, even us.
Melissanthe Mahut: Yeah, that’s obviously something we got better at as…
Michael Antonakos: Yeah.
We‘re curious about the homework though. How did you go about it individually?
Melissanthe Mahut: Um, it depends.
Everyone has their process after all.
Melissanthe Mahut: Obviously, that’s, yes, to begin with but I also think it depends on which bit. So the cinematics, I think, would have required a different kind of homework and then the voice over bulk would have required something very different. Cinematics were always much easier, correct me if I’m wrong, because it was much less, script-wise, than the VO. So we had maybe three of four scenes, maybe three pages each per shoot, on average.
Michael Antonakos: Yeah, there were smaller section of stuff we would be shooting. We had three, four or five scenes to shoot all week, maybe ten the most we had on, but they were broken up and weren’t very long. And we had time to prepare them, to brake down the…
Melissanthe Mahut:…the intention and the subtext and who we were meeting and…
Michael Antonakos:…the blocking…
Melissanthe Mahut:…we had to work a lot on that, basically. We had to basically decide on a commonish approach, because obviously we were portraying the same character so we both needed to agree to a big extent on what it was that we were bringing and how the scene would feel.
Michael Antonakos: Individually I would just break down the script on my own, I think you’d break down the script on your own and then when we met up to shoot in Toronto, we would sit down at the hotel usually…
Melissanthe Mahut:…compare notes…
Michael Antonakos:…usually before going to rehearsal, we would compare what we both had decided about the scene. Sometimes it was actually a little different than what I think the writers’ intention might have been and so we had to make a decision. Can we bring this to the writers and ask what they think, if they like the way we‘re approaching it?
Melissanthe Mahut: And they were very receptive when we did do that. I mean, on the very very few occasions that we actually ended up saying, you know, bringing an idea to the table, next day in the room, they were very open.
Michael Antonakos: Yeah, they were good that way. It was really nice. And so, from there, we would just continue to work at it and once it was on the stage and one of us was going first and the other one would follow and we’d be watching and literally help each other, critique each other and then fixing it, take 1, take 2 and then we’d switch.
Melissanthe Mahut: VO was a bit different. VO didn’t actually…because there was so much in terms of script.
Michael Antonakos: What she means “in terms of script”,
Melissanthe Mahut: I mean “a lot” in terms of script.
Michael Antonakos: Every week you get about a 200, 400, one time we got a 900-page script.
Melissanthe Mahut: I don’t even remember that. You mentioned that the other day, I don’t even remember that.
Michael Antonakos: I looked at it and I was like…
Melissanthe Mahut: …”wow”…
Michael Antonakos: So every week you get these 200-page scripts, let’s start right there. A 200-page script. That’s a movie. That’s one movie. But a big movie.
Melissanthe Mahut: And then for the movie you usually have a lot of time to practice for it.
Michael Antonakos: Months if you‘re on a feature.
Melissanthe Mahut: And this was, everything needed to be condensed within one week. So you can understand that a lot of the time there were things that were not addressed maybe as much as I would personally like to have been able to address something, analyse it or do more homework on it. So, after a while it started getting easier because you kind of got into the flow of how that problem should be dealt with once you come up against it but at the beginning it was really tricky. I felt that I didn’t have enough time to do the work that I felt that I’m, you know, usually given. But then again it’s a very different medium, voice over, video games. I mean, I think it’s part of the process, I think you need to be able to do that.
Michael Antonakos: Yeah, you’ve got to pick it up quick. You’re not counting because you only have enough time to read it. That’s about it. You have enough time to like read it once and then you’re recording. So to do real homework and to break it down and then go to the room all by yourself, it’s all chopped up, you go in different paths and directions, sometimes you might go over here and then ten minutes later come back to the other choice so having to keep all these things in your head…
Melissanthe Mahut: I actually found that much harder to be honest. Because I think the prep time, you do actually get used to it a bit so you’re like, OK, reading is gonna have to suffice and then you figure out a way to do that. But the bit of bouncing back and forth is actually very tricky to figure out, because it’s such a big arc, such a big story arc. So understanding exactly where you are as well and when there were lines you had to re-record, it was tricky.
Michael Antonakos: Yeah, you might finish your choice way over here and then you’d have to come back, in a conversation way back when, at the beginning and then make choices in a different direction. But you can’t remember exactly how you started that conversation.
And yet you have to reacclimate yourself.
Michael Antonakos: And you’re not talking to anyone so it’s all in your head. That was one of the biggest obstacles I found, it was that. To keep that honest and sincere and try to know how to navigate each change of a question and each choice, pattern and…it’s open world so your destiny is unknown. And that’s a really different obstacle to deal with other than like a film where you know the pattern. Characters gonna go this way. Well, they might not. They might go this way. So, yeah, that was very neat.
We suppose this challenge was a novelty to both of you as this was, correct if we’re wrong, your first game production at this scale.
Melissanthe Mahut: I think so, yes. I think it is.
Michael Antonakos: Yeah.
But it all makes sense as this is part of the idiosyncrasies of video game production. Very dynamic, very modular, very ad-hoc at times so I suppose this messes up with your usual processes. But it’s part of the fun.
Melissanthe Mahut: Part of the fun. It’s a great lesson, I’ve taken a lot from it. It actually makes you more, you know….
Michael Antonakos: You’re not so precious.
Melissanthe Mahut: No but you can actually pick up new skills and you learn how to deal with that. That’s what I’m saying. After a while you go, fine, this is what we’re doing, let’s make this work, let’s make this work and, eventually, by the end of it, it’s all worked out for the best.
Michael Antonakos: You get very crafty about it. You start seeing how things can move and yeah I’ve learnt more on this game than I have on anything in a very long time. It’s a school in itself. It was a school in itself.
You said that at times you had the chance to provide feedback to the script writers and make adjustments, one way or the other. How far did that go?
Michael Antonakos: It’s an interesting thing because sometimes I’ve experienced people like things and that’s the way it is, we want it like this. And so approaching that in the beginning it was an uncertain thing. Like, how will we be received when we bring our notes to the table and see it this way? And they were open and listening, then we talked through it and once they understood where our side was coming from, they were very receptive to adjusting. And I think it was a good move on them.
Melissanthe Mahut: Yeah.
Michael Antonakos: We wanted to continue and keep the characters as honest and sincere as possible and to the culture as well. We brought a lot more humour, I think, in the beginning and it continued to be received well and we really wanted to continue that flow of humour. Greeks can be really funny. Even when they’re sarcastic or bitter, there’s humour involved, so we were like, this needs a bit of humour. And it’s in the language, it’s in the flow, the way it colours. The accents really helped. Once you put an accent on, it changed the way it was delivered, compared to the way it was written.
It’s kind of funny how you had to use [Greek] accents you [yourselves] clearly don’t use in your everyday life when speaking English [despite your Greek ancestry and/or upbringing]. How do you wrap your head around that?
Melissanthe Mahut: Accents are fun!
Michael Antonakos: I love accents.
Melissanthe Mahut: Accents are great fun! Sometimes when you speak with an accent you discover this whole chunk of vocabulary that you had completely forgotten that you had, which is stored probably somewhere else in your brain. Oh, that word! You haven’t used that word in months, in years and it just unlocks when you use a different accent which I find it very, very enjoyable.
Michael Antonakos: Once you put on an accent it changes so much about you.
Melissanthe Mahut: Everything. Different personality, different persona, different physicality, everything changes.
Michael Antonakos: Different gestures, yeah. It’s really neat. I’ve been fortunate enough to have done accents for many different things and I find it fascinating how you just change by just throwing on an accent. It makes you more regal, just by putting on a British accent [author’s note: He said putting on that very accent].
Melissanthe Mahut: You’re showing off now.
Michael Antonakos: It’s simple. But it changes you. And then, when you do the Greek accent [said, again, in Greek accent] it makes it fun.
Melissanthe Mahut: You went a bit Earl Jones there somewhere!
Michael Antonakos: Did I?
Melissanthe Mahut: With the “r”, yeah! You tapped into that one!
Michael Antonakos: For me, once I find a voice and I settle into it, it brings the character, through me, alive, I find.
As for the change in direction in terms of humour, are we to take it that’s it was wholly up to you or maybe partly because of you?
Melissanthe Mahut: I don’t know.
Michael Antonakos: I know day one for me.
Melissanthe Mahut: What do you mean?
Michael Antonakos: When I was doing the motion capture, you weren’t there that day, it was just before you got hired. That test shoot day that ended up being a real shoot day for me.
Melissanthe Mahut: The scene that’s in a house…?
Michael Antonakos: It’s in the Acropolis. It’s in the Parthenon.
Melissanthe Mahut: No, no, no, it’s the other one, it’s in the house with somebody with the thing…
Michael Antonakos: Ah, yeah, it’s in the house. And I came up with the character —I still just barely knew what I was acting in at that point— but I had a very interesting way of approaching the scene. And when they yelled cut everyone was laughing and they called me “sassassin”! Because I was so sassy! It was a sassy type of condescending humour that came out of it and they really liked it. So everything kind of happened like that and it continued to get taken in that direction a little more.
Melissanthe Mahut: We started noticing after a while that, in the script, the quality, the type of the humour started actually changing. Bit by bit, every single bulk of text that we got, of script, it was slightly different, it was a bit more and it was a bit more, a bit more, a bit more and I was like “Yes! I love this!”. It’s snarkier.
Michael Antonakos: it started more straight and it got a little…
So…long story short it’s your fault.
Melissanthe Mahut: Thank you, man!
Michael Antonakos: I’ll take the blame for “Sassassin’s Creed”.
No, it actually worked out well. It was among the comments the Press made during the launch event in Athens, that was the concensus among the Press, that there humour more closely attuned to our own culture, something that we didn’t really expect going in. So, all things considered, we think this will go down as a success.
Michael Antonakos: It’d be nice, yeah. We really wanted to keep a lot of the Greek culture in the way people interact alive in the game. That was really important to us.
How many times did you have to say maláka?
Laughter
Michael Antonakos: A lot!
Melissanthe Mahut: Yeah, a lot. I kept trying to squeeze other things in there as well, e specially in mo-cap. I wanted more. I wanted more swear words. I was trying but it didn’t…
Michael Antonakos: It was the amount of ways we had to say maláka which was really fun. So we had to always find really fun new ways to approach it.
Melissanthe Mahut: “Say it as a question”. “Say it as an order”. “Say it shock”! “Say it lustfully”!
[Author’s note: at this point everyone involved is bursting with laughter]
Melissanthe Mahut: I was…why?
Michael Antonakos: I’d like to see you do that!
Melissanthe Mahut: We have done that!
Michael Antonakos: I know but I’d like to see you do that!
Melissanthe Mahut: No, I’m not going to that. This is a serious interview.
Have you made a bet with each other as to the percentage of people that are going to play as Alexios or Kassandra?
Melissanthe Mahut: I like that idea and I’m gonna do it.
Michael Antonakos: I knew when you were hired.
Melissanthe Mahut: Yeah, but not about the exact percentage, we can place a bet.
Michael Antonakos: Ah, let’s see…
Melissanthe Mahut: We’re going to do it now?
Michael Antonakos: Can you guys find out the actual percentages?
Ubisoft can.
Michael Antonakos: What kind of bet are we making?
Melissanthe Mahut: Do you want to make it in public?
Michael Antonakos: This is public.
Melissanthe Mahut: Oh, dear. This could take a while. We’ll get back to that, we actually have to think about this.
Michael Antonakos: I told her as I was beginning, “you have no idea how important you are”.
Melissanthe Mahut: I didn’t quite know how to take that as he said that.
Michael Antonakos: Being the first female lead assassin character in the world. I was like “good luck for me”.
You’re definitely getting the short end of the stick. There’s no way for you to win.
Michael Antonakos: It’s a tough one.
Did you get the chance to personally work with Lydia Andrew, the game’s audio director?
Melissanthe Mahut: Yeah, yeah. At the very beginning. She was the most amazing person to have in an audition. Because she was, I don’t know really how to describe it, she was just, she took up all the roles of somebody who would mediate, somebody who would soften, somebody who would take care of you, somebody who would give you the direction that you needed to hear exactly the way that you needed to hear it. And she just removed all element of stress throughout the initial audition. She was absolutely wonderful.
Michael Antonakos: I’ll give you an example. In some casting experience I have, you come in, you walk in the room, it’s very cool, you say your name to a camera and then a reader starts acting with you. And when you’re done they say “thank you, bye”. It can be a very stressful situation for actors to be able to just stay strong and grounded and do their thing and walk out and feel confident. So when I went to my first audition, a callback with Lydia in Toronto, she brought me in, she talked with me, she had a couple other people there and she introduced me, we talked, they wanted to know a bit about me, got to a place of relaxation, she sat in with us, asked me questions about me and then we talked about the scene and the character. And then, when we got another actor to come in, she was very, very compassionate towards actors and being there for them. And that’s rare. She was a gem and a pleasure to audition with. And she was like that for the rest of the period, as we begun the game, helping us, making us feel comfortable.
So, to round things up, what do you say would most probably stay with you after this?
Melissanthe Mahut: I’m stuck with you. [Author’s note: Looks over to Michael Antonakos]. Friendship.
Michael Antonakos: Our friendship. Yeah.
Melissanthe Mahut: That was just a really unexpected thing.
Michael Antonakos: Yeah, you know, when you usually work on a job, you make friends and so on. But we’re like, we’re friends. Life friends. It’s great.
Maybe you really are the same character.
Melissanthe Mahut: There are a lot of similarities actually. When I went home and I told my wife, I was like “I met the female version of myself”.
[Laughing]
Melissanthe Mahut: It is weird, it is weird. It is very very weird.
Michael Antonakos: Yeah.
Melissanthe Mahut: It’s gotten to the point where it’s like family now.
Michael Antonakos: Yeah.
Melissanthe Mahut: Basically this is what we’re gonna take away. I’m gonna take away, like, a very long time, this is like a life thing that you take away. All jokes aside and everything, game-related aside, this is something really important that we’re taking away now. In terms of the game, God, the experience. It’s not even done yet. I have no idea what’s gonna happen the next few weeks. The launch is like a week from now? So that’s a completely different chapter. Let’s see what happens.
Michael Antonakos: The knowledge and skills that I feel I gathered, I think you did too, during this process in the last year and a half. I will take that away and it’s only going to be a benefit as our careers continue and we continue work on other projects. I feel like my tool kit has been filled with a lot of useful things.
Melissanthe Mahut: Yeah.
Michael Antonakos: [Things] that can only improve us as performers and artists.
Any thoughts creeping in about focusing your work more towards gaming for any reason?
Michael Antonakos: I love videogames, I’ve been doing them for 15 years now so I’ll continue doing them for as long as I can. Motion capture is one of my favourite things to do so, if I can continue like that, I will.
Melissanthe Mahut: I’d love to. I’d love to be able to. It’s completely new to me. I didn’t have the experience that Michael did, I haven’t delved into it as much as Michael has done in the past, so this is like a brand new baby for me and I want to keep exploring it a bit more.
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