It is said that Kurt Russell was once asked to voice Snake in Metal Gear Solid 3, and in a new interview, he talked about why he wouldn’t be interested in the part.
It’s no secret that Hideo Kojima loves movies—it’s kind of his thing. He liked them so much that he fired longtime Snake voice actor David Hayter and hired Kiefer Sutherland to play Snake in Metal Gear Solid 5.
Back in 2016, Hayter said that Kojima tried to get Russell from Escape from New York to play Snake in Metal Gear Solid 3.
Solid Snake is a reference to Snake Plissken from the John Carpenter movie. It seems that Russell turned down the part, and in a recent video interview with GQ, he talked about why he wouldn’t do something like that.
“Listen, I’m naturally pretty lazy,” Russell responded. “There have been many times when people wanted to action something.” I don’t know; I normally watch movies.
Let you know that that was the project from my point of view, whether it was Elvis, Snake Plissken, Jack Burton, or R.J. MacReady. That thing was that one. You get in that frame of mind. You make that happen. That world is something you want to make happen.
“When Elvis was just starting out, people would ask me to do some Elvis for them during interviews.” As simple as that sounds, you can’t just slide into and out of Elvis. Start working on it.
You work on it, then do it, and get paid for it. I’m from a varied past. I didn’t want to make money off of something we had made or something I had made up in terms of a character.
Russell also said something important: if Carpenter wasn’t involved, Russell wouldn’t have been interested in that either. “That wasn’t written by John,” I’d say after taking a deep breath and adding, “That doesn’t smell right.” This is not what John is here to do. That is not what I am going to do. Let’s make another famous character. Let’s go do something new and different.”
Russell doesn’t mind going back to play old roles; he did play Snake again in a sequel to Escape from New York, and he plays Santa in several Christmas Chronicle movies. I don’t blame him for not taking on a part in a game he hasn’t heard of, though.
Video games weren’t very well known outside of their own genre at the time. Also, Hayter is a well-known character, so they shouldn’t have fired him for MGSV.
