Mike Patton on Voicing a Video Game, Faith No More Reunion
Faith No More singer and songwriter Mike Patton has a starring role in The Darkness II, where he voices the character of the Darkness, an evil power that takes over the protagonist Jackie, a mafia hitman. The game, out on February 7th, 2012 from 2K Games, is the sequel to 2007’s The Darkness, and is based on the comic series of the same name by Mark Silvestri.
“They wanted some kind of otherworldly voice, basically screaming and narration, and I thought, ‘that’s kind of in my wheelhouse,'” Patton tells Rolling Stone from Comic Con International in San Diego. The singer, known for his powerful, distinctive wailing on songs such as “Epic” and “Midlife Crisis,” says he was familiar with the comic but had never done any voice acting. “I thought it was something I should try and could learn something from.”
Faith No More – Epic by Studio D Recording
Patton says that while he is not an avid gamer in his spare time, he does play, and particularly enjoyed Red Dead Redemption, which is “a game that’s really a universe as opposed to a game.” He also says he has a long history with video games, coming from “the era of cruising around arcades.”
On the Faith No More front, Patton says the band will play a humanitarian festival in Brazil in November, their first show since a successful reunion tour last year. “Other than that, we don’t have plans for a new recording or anything like that, we’re just taking it slow as it comes,” says Patton. “Reunions can be done very distastefully I think, and we were all very worried about that. But I think we were all very surprised with how good it felt. It’s a tired old script: band splits up, gets hard up for cash, goes on tour and records a shitty record. We don’t want to be part of that kind of history.”
In addition to working on “a couple of classical records” and a new album for his alt-metal group Tomahawk, Patton also recently finished a soundtrack for an Italian film called The Solitude of Prime Numbers, which he will release on his label Ipecac Recordings in October. “It’s very orchestral and textured and subtle,” he says, “which is, you know, a bit of a departure for me.”