Game Stooge

COMIC CON 09: Carlos Ferro Interview

• Scribbled on February 17th, 2009 by Jonah Falcon
• Filed in Comic Con, Interviews, Microsoft Xbox 360, Shooter

Carlos Ferro is a rising voice over artist in the video game industry best known for his role as Dominic “Dom” Santiago in the Gears of War series, but he’s becoming more than that. He’s also a role model for young Latino teens, an author, and a music producer, but he still retains self-awareness, humility, and constant amazement at his own success – all while remaining a total video game geek, and proud of it. He also agreed to an exclusive GameStooge interview during the New York Comic Con weekend.

Ferro started his career by being a nightclub DJ in his hometown of San Francisco, with the hope of becoming a music producer. However, he became increasingly acquainted with the actors and actresses who would come to the clubs, and started graduate work at the American Conservatory Theater to earn his Master of Fine Arts degree, all while continuing his DJ’ing at night. Once he earned his MFA, he moved to Los Angeles to look for work.

Carlos found himself getting regular work on stage and television. He prides himself on his one man show Sal, a stage production he wrote and starred in about the life of Sal Mineo and the seedier side of Hollywood, which received rave reviews from the Los Angeles press. He won a recurring role as Luis Ruiz in the short-lived grim cop drama Midnight Caller, and otherwise bounced around television. He prides himself on managing to snag a redshirt role during Star Trek: The Next Generation’s final season, being animalistic Worf’s victim Ensign Dern in “Genesis”. “It was a privilege to get on Star Trek before it ended,” he states, knowing at the time that the seventh season would be the last.

However, during the rounds of auditioning for television ad work, he became involved with voice over acting. He starred in such cartoons as the short-lived Santo Bugito (which co-starred Joan Van Ark, Cheech Marin, William Sanderson, David Paymer, George Kennedy, Tony Plana and one of Ferro’s idols, Charles Adler), Duckman, Static Shock, Spawn, and Justice League.

Despite the voice over work, Carlos knew that he wasn’t getting the work his talents should have been getting. As a Latin/Italian actor, the serious roles just weren’t available. Despite Hollywood’s yearly promises about it being “Hispanic time”, Latino actors just weren’t seeing increased visibility. Similar to the travails seen by African Americans in Hollywood Shuffle, one of the common jokes that would be between Carlos and his peers regarding Hispanic acting work was, “Are we boxers this year, or drug dealers?”

Video games were hardly different in the mid-90’s. In such games as James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, and Driver: Parallel Lines, his voice work would be for Latino stereotypes. However, things began to slowly change. 1998’s Grim Fandango gave his friend Tony Plana one of the meatiest and best-written roles for a Hispanic voice actor playing Manny Calavera; not only was Manny a witty, intelligent and beloved character, but a great deal of the game focused on Mexican culture. After a few years, Carlos got his big break as Dominic Santiago in Gears of War.

According to Ferro, he was told after he’d been cast that the writer of the game, Eric Nyland, had listened to tons of tapes and underwent hundreds of auditions, including some of the best name talents in the industry, for the role of Dom. None of them could get a handle on Dom but Carlos. Furthermore, the Dom that ended up as the character seen in the game was not the same as the Dom they had originally written – Carlos had a large hand in creating Dom. Ferros relates, “When it comes to storytelling, from Cliffy B [Blesinski] and Mark Rein to Rod Fergusson to the actors are involved, they’re all involved in making the story truthful.” He adds, “They really wrote the book on letting the voice talent be involved in the process. A lot of my improvisations were kept as well as the other actors, John [DiMaggio] and Lester [Speight, aka The Mighty Rasta] in particular.”

Dom became fairly popular in his own right in the first game, partly because he was controlled by the second player in co-op campaigns – it didn’t hurt that certain Achievements required a player to control Dom – and partly became he was the character with whom the audience could identify, who wasn’t the gravel-voiced, hardened Marcus Fenix (DiMaggio). When something nasty happened, it was Dom who was the surrogate for the audience with “Oh… shit!” reactions. As likeable as Dom was, however, he was still just Marcus’ sidekick, elevated above other sidekicks like Cole Train and Damon Baird only because he was a controllable character.

That changed in Gears of War 2, when professional writer Joshua Ortega was hired to write the script. Ortega had already written stories for every comic book publisher including DC Comics, Marvel, Dark Horse, Image, Top Cow, TOKYOPOP, Dynamite Entertainment, and had written a best-selling science fiction novel ((FREQUENCIES)). Ortega had different ideas for Dom, and decided to tremendously expand the character, and that included putting one of the riskiest scenes ever in a mainstream video game – the “Finding Maria” scene.

The scene was a brutally stark, emotionally raw set piece involving Dom’s wife Maria, who had been referred to over the course of the first game and the second to this point. She had been missing, and part of Dom’s desires was to find her; he kept a photo of her on his person at all times. Eventually, during the game, Dom did find her as one of the slaves that had been tortured to the point of mindlessness by the alien Locusts. To Dom’s horror, she was well-past the point of no return, an unrecoverable husk of her former self, unable to even recognize him or speak. In the end, he had to euthanize her with a single gunshot to the head, gratefully off-screen.

Microsoft and Epic were unsurprisingly worried about the scene. Even for a video game, it was harrowing and emotional, and while it was one thing for Marcus to cut alien scum in half with a  gun-mounted chainsaw, it was another for a starkly realistic reaction to the unthinkable. Carlos, however, was more than happy to do the scene, saying, “I really liked the idea of giving the player the experience of more story and more emotion.” Plus, by that time, Dom was Carlos, and Carlos knew every inch of his character inside and out.

When Carlos first got the script, he first asked the producers, “Do you want me to go there?” Unlike many voice actors, Ferro stands and acts out the part, lending a natural feel for it. For this scene, however, he went as far as using motion capture to completely give a naturalistic feel for every move and gesture. He adds that he had more steps done to add to the mood: “Gotta turn down the lights, gotta give me the time, gotta give me a few ways to do it, use varying emotions, and so on.” Ferro poured his heart into the acting job, and remembers now how he knew he’d nailed it at the time, “Well, where I saw people getting choked up was the control room.”

His performance was so evidently fantastic to the rest of the cast and crew, that word spread that Gears of War 2 was going to showcase Ferro’s talents, with most of the trumpeting coming from co-star DiMaggio, who bragged that Carlos would be stealing the show when the game was released. Ferro considers DiMaggio to not only be a fantastic voice actor, but a close friend.  They first worked on Spawn, and by the time the first Gears came around, they were close friends. “We like playing off each other. By the time Gears 2 came out, we work in the same booth, especially for the Finding Maria scene.”

As DiMaggio had predicted, his vocal work catapulted Dom from just a likeable sidekick to a fan favorite, and an adored character for Hispanic video game fans. When Carlos appeared for Comic Con NY 09 to sign autographs, he’d been assigned a small booth against the wall, which turned out to be someone’s shortsighted mistake, as fans crowded the table and created blockage problems for the narrow aisle. Carlos attracted the attention one would normally see for one of the featured autographers.

Ferro laughs with a mixture of embarrassment, pride and genuine warmth about his character’s idolization by young Hispanic teens. “What I found since Gears 1, there is that there is a real love for Dom, a genuine affection for the character,” Carlos muses, “And the number one question by the fans is, why isn’t there a game starring Dom?” He also found out that the “Top 3″ quotes by Dom are:

• 1. S’up bitches?
• 2. Shit, yeah!
• 3. Walk it off, pussy!

Even more funny to Carlos is that the fans often would want him to sign the headshot or item with one of the quotes, “ie. To Daniel, Walk it off, pussy!, Carlos Ferro.”

Ferro isn’t about to allow his sudden fame to go to waste, too. Wanting to give Hispanic teens more role models, he and Ortega are developing a new intellecutal property: an as-of-yet-unnamed comic book title starring a Hispanic superhero who will be a three-dimensional person, rather than a superpowered Latin stereotype often seen in the past, such as the old Marvel Comics character Tarantula. Part of the motivation was a complete lack of Hispanic characters at all in the comics of Ferro’s youth. So desperate was Carlos for a Latino hero that, “If there was black hair, must be Latin. Hey, Pinocchio must be Latin – he has black hair!” He intends to make sure that his fans never have a lack of heroes they can identify with.

Ferro’s star continues to rise. He stars as Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II video game adaptation, and recently has done a pilot starring 24’s Carlos Bernard. He’d even written, directed and produced a film, Rastros, back in 2004. There’s no telling what heights this multi-talented guy will reach, but one thing is for sure – he’ll never forget his roots, and he’ll never let anything keep him from achieving his dreams.