Kurt Russell gives thoughtful and nuanced answer about why he wouldn't voice Snake in Metal Gear Solid 3, also seems to think the character is actually Snake Plissken

GamesActionKurt Russell gives thoughtful and nuanced answer about why he wouldn’t voice Snake in Metal Gear Solid 3, also seems to think the character is actually Snake PlisskenWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Konami)

Metal Gear Solid 3 art by Yoji Shinkawa

Since the series' earliest days on the humble MSX, one of the big inspirations behind Metal Gear has been John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. Protagonist Solid Snake gets his callsign from Kurt Russell’s character Snake Plissken (a link that would later be solidified when Snake uses the codename Plisken in MGS2), as well as his general bearing and attitude andequipment, while later games will make the Snake connection even more obvious with the addition of a Plissken-style eyepatch.

“I had to re-audition for Metal Gear 3 to play Naked Snake,“said Hayter in 2016. “They made me re-audition to play Old Snake, and the whole time, they were trying to find somebody else to do it. I heard that Kojima asked one of the producers on Metal Gear 3 to ask Kurt Russell if he would take over for that game. He didn’t want to do it.”

Hayter would go on to voice Naked Snake in MGS3 and take his final bow as Solid Snake in MGS4. But the notion that Russell could’ve voiced a character based so heavily on one of his own characters has always been a piece of catnip trivia for some fans, and in a new interview with GQ the actor was asked about being approached to star in the series. Warning: the question is direct, but his answer is thoughtful, nuanced, and possibly slightly confused about how close the characters are.

“I used to do interviews when Elvis was coming out and they would say, ‘C’mon, do a little Elvis for us.’ I’d be like… it doesn’t work that way, you don’t just slide in-and-out of Elvis. You go to work on it. You refine it, and then you do it and you get paid for that. I come from a different era. I wasn’t interested in expanding financially off of something that we had created or that I had created in terms of a character.”

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It should be pointed out that Russell did reprise his role as Snake Plissken in Escape from LA: but that’s a John Carpenter film, and it’s also a total banger. Russell ends with some humorously rueful reflection at describing any of his own characters as “iconic.”

“You don’t look at them as iconic characters,” says Russell. “[Fans] refer to them as that, if they become that… you’re on [the set] day-to-day running it, having a good time and trying to make it work!”

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