Troy Baker is a man of many voices, but fans mostly know him for his roles in The Last of Us, various Batman projects where he plays either The Dark Knight himself or the Joker, Uncharted 4, and Death Stranding. If you’ve played a video game in the last decade or so, you’ve almost definitely heard Baker’s voice at some point. He’s played protagonists, antagonists, and everything in between, but one of his next roles is attached to a project that you may not really expect. Screamer, a new game from Milestone, is a reboot of a 90s racing series, but this time it comes packaged with a highly stylized, rich narrative with a colorful international cast of characters.
In addition to an interview with Troy Baker himself, ComicBook is excited to debut an exclusive and extensive behind-the-scenes look at Screamer, which clues fans in not only on modernizing this cult-classic franchise but also the great deal of effort that has gone into telling a story in this game. It’s not an IP you’d expect to have much of a story, but it’s clearly important to Milestone this time around. Check out the video below for a more in-depth peek behind the curtain of the game.
I was fortunate enough to speak with Troy Baker for about 40 minutes about Screamer, a game which he is very enthusiastic about. Baker plays Mr. A, the game’s antagonist and the mastermind orchestrating the plot that is driving all of the races in the game. He came into our call oozing with passion and energy, giving me a nearly five-minute winding answer to my very first hard-hitting question: How are you?
The conversations was filled with tangents and deep dives into not just Screamer, but also his thoughts on acting as a whole. But first and foremost, I wanted to know how familiar he was with this IP before he signed on and how an older, niche franchise like this re-emerges decades later.
“We’re in an age right now where it’s a very volatile industry,” said Baker. “Everyone right now is trying to find the corners of where we are, and there’s this temptation and a tendency right now to take what is considered a known quantity and something that you can look at the stakeholders and go, ‘Hey, we’re not asking you to step out into terra incognito, absolutely purely on faith. We can back this up. This is a known quantity.’ And then you have the other people who say, ‘We’re not going to take any risks.’ They’re completely risk-averse. And so they go for, ‘Just give me the 14th iteration of this thing.’
“What I applaud about [Milestone’s] effort is that they kind of didn’t do either, but at the same time, the team was responsible. You have to be responsible. It’s a lot of money at stake. There’s a lot of people’s jobs at stake, and so you can’t enter into a project lightly with just fingers crossed and hoping everyone is just along for the journey. You have to be able to justify this.
“So being able to take something that has found an audience before, but what if we don’t just re-skin it and rehash it, but what if we actually really reiterate on this and create something new, to where someone who may be familiar with the franchise is going to go, ‘Oh, I know that game.’ No, you don’t. Or someone who goes, ‘I’ve never heard of this game.’ We say, ‘Good.’ We can immediately drop you in. That is walking the razor’s edge of a reboot. And they did this skillfully, deftly, and flawlessly in my opinion.”
As mentioned, Baker plays the antagonist at the heart of Screamer‘s story. However, he’d never label Mr. A or any of his more nefarious characters as villains. The actor responsible for playing Joker, Far Cry 4‘s Pagan Min, and Two-Face noted that he has never played a villain, stating that he has to approach them as the hero of their own story, otherwise it feels like he’s judging them or can’t empathize with them at all. So, how does Mr. A justify himself as the hero of his own story?
“What I really appreciated about [narrative director Kerry Kazmierowicztrimm] is that he helped define this character by an event. I think that we as humans have these pivotal moments in our life, these events that shape us, that form us, that define us. It’s also something that’s objective. So both of us can look at the same event, not the same emotion, but the same event, and go, ‘Here’s how I would respond to this,’ or ‘I understand why this is how he’s responding to this.’ For me, that became the bedrock of the character, to understand the empathy, because we’ll learn about this. There’s an event in his life that determines everything.”
As for what exactly this event is, Baker isn’t sharing just yet: “If there’s not a surprise in the game, we’ve told a boring story,” he said.
One of the things developers learn when they bring Troy Baker on to their project is that he isn’t going to just roll over, say his lines, and go home. He’s a collaborator, and he will ask a lot of “pesky questions” (his words, not mine). He doesn’t expect immediate answers, but he likes to fully understand where his character is at in the story, what’s happening in the scene, and little details that might make a difference in his performance. So, what kind of “pesky questions” did Baker ask during the development of this game? As the orchestrator of the events in Screamer, Baker thought it would be important to know if Mr. A has a hot mic on him at all times.
“The thing that I brought to it was by asking a question was like, is he mic’d for the majority of the times that we’re hearing him? Is there a microphone? And there was a discussion, and they said yes. I’m like, ‘Great, then this is someone who knows that [they are mic’d up].’ If we can diegetically use this apparatus that we’re enlisting to capture my performance, so can he. So being able to lean in and understand the quiet moments, to bring a quiet calm to someone who is grandstanding to me, is a juxtaposition and is interesting.”
In essence, Mr. A is a character who is intentional with everything he says and weaponizes the fact that he can be heard at all times.
“There’s not a single word that escapes his mouth. That is extemporaneous. Everything that he’s saying is carefully calculated. This is someone who has created this Machiavellian thing in order to test, control, and manipulate all these people. You think he’s winging it on a speech? Nuh-uh.”
As previously noted, Baker is someone who likes to ask lots of questions and sometimes gets into appropriately heated/passionate conversations with creatives. He and Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann clash quite a bit, for instance: “We just love to just butt up against each other.” Knowing this, I asked him for his thoughts on a viral behind-the-scenes clip from the set of Superman (2025).
In the clip, director James Gunn and actor David Corenswet have a pretty intense conversation about Superman’s monologue at the end of the film. It’s a fascinatingly transparent and raw look at how the sausage is made, and Baker had an interesting take on it.
“My perception of this, and maybe I’m viewing this through the lens of my own experience, but I looked at what David [Corenswet] was doing and I saw a very, very afraid actor. There is a great quote by [Deadwood creator] David Milch, who said that actors either operate out of fear or faith, and our jobs as creatives is to create such an environment that allows them to circumnavigate that fear and operate in that place of faith.
“Maybe this wasn’t the situation with him, but I know that a lot with me, if I ask a question, there’s a little bit of fear that I don’t know the answer, that I won’t know how to make the choice that people will think it’s bad. I start getting in my head. If I start arguing, now I would say that that is proportionate to the amount of fear that I have.
“What I would say is with that video clip, at least that clip, and I have no idea what that day was like for them. I’ve certainly had bad days too, and I’ve popped off on stage before. But the reality is that I was afraid, and I think that I respect David for having that fear because that means that he understands the stakes and he understands the weight. And there are times when I push back on the team, and I have to admit that there’s some fear in that. Either I won’t know how to execute what they want, or I’m afraid that I’m not understanding what it is that they want. I think the version of it might not be as good as what I think it could be.”
Ultimately, Baker related it all back to Screamer and concluded that the actor should give it their best go and trust the creatives at the helm to guide them, regardless of how scary it might feel.
“I need to be thinking about where Mr. A is in this moment right now. Because he doesn’t know he’s in a game. So I skim the hard deck, and a lot of times I’m looking at it going, ‘I’m going too fast. You guys don’t know what you’re doing.’ And I trust the team to go, ‘We’ve got you. We’re in an AWAC that’s circling high above you, and we’ve got great visibility. Skies are clear.’”
That message of trust was a recurring one during my time with Troy Baker. Actors don’t just have to trust the creatives, but the writers, directors, and producers have to trust the actors to interpret the work and do their jobs, too.
“The thing that I have seen that is consistent among studios that continue to create things of quality is that the level of quality is proportionate to their level of trust. And whether it be Hideo Kojima, Neil Druckmann, Kerry, or anyone here on this team, they go, ‘We’ve come prepared. We will provide you with all the information that we need, and we’re going to trust that we made a really smart decision when we cast you.”
Baker noted that during his time on Death Stranding, Kojima trusted his actors. That’s partially because Kojima curates roles for the actors he wants and writes specifically for them, so he trusts them to take the material and shape it from there. That trust between everyone is what allows for something of a higher quality.
“You can’t have high quality and no trust. I’ve never seen it happen. At some point, you have to do that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade leap from the lion’s head, where you just step out and trust the ground will be underneath you. I certainly felt that with this team. They were never bereft, anemic, short, or in any way resistant to me asking for more information. I think that speaks to the caliber of the culture of the studio more than it does just about a project. I think that to really understand a game, you have to understand the studio. So, I always encourage people to look up the studio.”
As of 2022, developer Milestone had an employee headcount of 280 people. The studio is best known for making a wide variety of racing games that range from super arcade-y to highly detailed sims. As a result, Screamer comes across as a much more ambitious undertaking with the inclusion of a very fleshed-out narrative brought to life by a talented voice cast, eye-popping art direction, and the depth of the gameplay. Despite all of this, Baker believes that Milestone has gone above and beyond what would be expected of this team with Screamer.
“From what I’ve seen so far, the bar of this game far extends beyond the rational expectation of the studio. We shot higher than probably what we should have. It makes me have hope for not the 800, 900, or even 500 team studios, but the 50 and the 100, and the 150 team studios, where you go, ‘Man, there is a tight group of people that are so focused on quality that that’s their only mark. That’s the only star that they’re steering the ship towards.’ And I feel like that’s what we did. We blew past the mark.”
Screamer will release in 2026 for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC. What do you think of Screamer? Let me know in the comments and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
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