Becoming Voss: Bringing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's incredibly punchable bad guy to life with Marios Gavrilis
"I have the black belt in trash talk, not in karate."
There are bad guys and then there are Bad Guys that you just can't wait to punch in the face. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's Emmerich Voss falls easily into that second category. He's a Nazi, and an especially vile one at that. Voss is so snide and so sure of himself in that greasy, smart arse kind of way. He plays on people's weaknesses and exploits them, allowing him to use (and abuse) others to his advantage. "Nothing is quite so easy to manipulate as an insecure male," he says at one point. And don't get me started on those gestures. Yes, Voss is a very punchable bad guy, and this is a sign of a job well done by Voss' actor, Marios Gavrilis.
The Greek Gavrilis was born and raised in Germany, and along with acting and a spot of film producing, he has also been a mainstay on the voice-over and dubbing scene for 20 years. If you ever play Death Stranding in German, the voice you will hear coming from Sam Porter Bridges' lips, that's Gavrilis. He also dubbed Alexios in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Venom in Spider-Man 2 and Dani Rojas in Far Cry 6. As for his live-action work, he has starred in a rather brilliant short film based on social deduction game Among Us, to name but one.
When Gavrilis first auditioned for the role of Voss, he had no idea where things were heading. The project was shrouded in mystery; code names were used for both the title and its characters. "I never imagined it would be Indiana Jones," he tells me. "I did know though that it was a MachineGames title, and since my character was German, I thought it could be for the new Wolfenstein game."
The scene Gavrilis was given for his audition was actually Voss' very first introduction in the Great Circle. "I thought 'wow, that's some brilliantly intense written character'. The writing in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, particularly in that scene, is straight up genius."
He eventually found out he'd got the part at the end of 2021, and only then was he told the game was an Indiana Jones title, and he was going to be the main adversary to Troy Baker's Indy.
"I was flabbergasted, I couldn't believe it. Thank God I didn't know that I was auditioning for something that big. I would've probably screwed up the audition big time," Gavrilis says, adding from a psychological point, "it can be an advantage not knowing what you're going in for". This element of the unknown can leave an actor feeling "freer", and therefore allow them to "try out unconventional things" during an audition.
For Gavrilis, this sense of freedom saw him put a rather interesting spin on his audition scene. For those unfamiliar with Voss' introduction, the scene in question sees the Nazi leader threatening corrupt Vatican resident Father Ventura by insinuating that, should the priest not comply with his wishes, he'd reveal Ventura's predilection for some very un-celibate kind of behaviour. And, to fully emphasise what exactly it was that Voss was threatening the priest with, Gavrilis used some rather suggestive gestures and facial expressions as well as his speech. "In other words: how do you tell someone you'll expose his love for giving blowjobs without breaking the age ranking and context of Indiana Jones," he says. "If I knew this was Indiana Jones, I would have probably played safe and would've just delivered the line less involved."
However, this use of graphic gestures did the job (no pun intended), and they ultimately made it into the game's final cut.
But, landing the part was only the beginning. Gavrilis still had to get ready to portray the Great Circle's reprehensible Nazi, now knowing full well the enormity of what was resting on his shoulders.
"Part of the preparation is, of course, the breakdown of the script and the psychological analysis of the character. There's the ideological part: Voss is not just a follower type of Nazi, he's in the SS, which makes him an offender by conviction, indoctrinated to the bone, totally soaked by the Nazi ideology. However, he has his very own agenda and objectives, and filtering them out was the most pivotal thing in the prep process. What is it that drives him, why is he the way he is?" Gavrilis explains.
He always wanted to make sure he found the right voice for Voss, stating the character has a very "distinct" way of speaking. "Voss uses language as a torture tool to intimidate and humiliate his enemies, so I really leaned into arming him up with his greatest and most menacing of weapons - his style of talking."
Gavrilis continues: "Besides all the mindset work and behavioral patterns, I also had to find the right tone in terms of the IP. After all, this is an Indiana Jones game, so tonewise and aesthetically, it has to stay true to the realm of the Indiana Jones IP. Of course I rewatched all of the movies, especially Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, as our game chronologically is set between these two, and paid special attention to antagonists like Toht and Belloq. But I did want to add a bit of Klaus Kinski flavour to him in terms of intensity."
To keep refining Voss, Gavrilis worked with acting coaches Bernard Hiller and Adrian Gaeta, whom he calls two of the best in the business. "I've been working with them for many years, and they know what kind of qualities of mine I had to bring to the table for Voss," he says. And of course, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's director Tom Keegan played a big role in shaping Voss.
"Tom Keegan is an absolute mastermind and his vision of Voss was on par with how I envisioned him. Tom knew exactly how to trigger the right approach with the directions he gave."
Gavrilis understood that even though heinous, at the end of the day Voss is still human, and someone who has his own insecurities and emotions weighing on him. "No matter how much Voss is trying to hide all of that in his attempt for total superiority, he can't help it, ultimately it will shine through," Gavrilis reasons. "And as an actor, you have to make him human, otherwise he's just a soulless cartoonish figure. That's the challenge of playing a villain of his kind. There is a fine line between making him a believable and profoundly disturbing antagonist and making him an over-the-top cringy clown nobody takes seriously."
But what is it that actually makes Voss such an enticing and standout baddie among other baddies out there? "I think it's his radical and unapologetic nature. He is truly driven. It's the constant switch on a razor's edge between deadpan seriousness and clownery. He has joker-like qualities, almost like a God level troll, a school bully who took shithousery to a whole different level, backing it up with true knowledge and skill," Gavrilis replies.
"However, he never acts 'clowny' for the sake of cheap entertainment. He uses his clownery to humiliate and degrade his opponents, sticking the finger into their wounds, adding some salt and pepper on top and then stirring everything up. He is so controlling and calculating, that when he does lose control, he's so furious that walls start to shake. I think for the audience, it's always entertaining when someone as untouchable and superior-feeling like Voss loses his shit."
Thankfully Gavrilis revels in playing such a deplorable character. "Out of all the great feedback I was fortunate enough to receive, hearing that so many people have violent tendencies towards Voss is probably my favourite compliment," Gavrilis tells me. "I can't cherish acting enough for giving me the opportunity to embrace these kinds of characters and commit to them. Playing the baddies is fun. Period. And they're a great vehicle to express darkness we all carry inside of us just as much as light."
So even though Voss is clearly not the character we should be siding with, Gavrilis didn't necessarily approach Voss as 'The Villain' in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. "In his own world, he's the hero of the story, the real Indiana Jones," Gavrilis says of Voss. "You have to fall in love with your character, promote his point of view with reckless abandon, no matter how much you may disagree with him deep down, otherwise you're just playing villainy, you never truly tap into the complexity of who the character really is.
"Ultimately, that's what acting is about. Don't play that guy, find what resonates with you about him and be that guy. And Voss, after all, is a deeply hurt and unloved soul making up in disastrous ways for his pain. I - thank God - cannot relate to the latter, but I - just like anyone - can for sure relate to having been hurt in life in one way or another. That's the essential matching element you're looking for as an actor to identify with your part."
But while Gavrilis immersed himself in the role, he didn't go quite so far as to become a karate expert like Voss. "And thank goodness I didn't. Otherwise we would have never finished our game. I have the black belt in trash talk, not in karate," Gavrilis jokes.
On that note, there was actually a discussion among the Great Circle team about how to pronounce 'karate' correctly, and it turns out I have been saying it wrong for 30 plus years. "We had a Japanese assistant director and she was the one telling us the correct way to pronounce it was to stress the last syllable," Gavrilis tells me. "So Voss, in his style, just added some salt and pepper to that, that's all."
I ask Gavrilis if there is a specific behind the scenes moment from the Great Circle that stands out, and he tells me about the time he was struck down with Covid, but as is often the way with these things, work had to continue. Of course, the team and Gavrilis weren't about to put others at risk of becoming ill, so he stayed put while everyone else made their way to the set. But what to do with Voss? He is, after all, a rather key player in the Great Circle's narrative. Thankfully, stunt man Nicklas Hansson saved the day and stepped in for Gavrilis.
"Meanwhile, I was at home in front of my laptop connected via Zoom with Stockholm and looking through a set camera onto what was going on," Gavrilis recalls. "I gave Niklas instructions on how I would like him to move and turn as Voss. I had a mic and I did the voice-over while Niklas was doing the physical part simultaneously." Everyone else on set, including the actors, continued on as normal, but with Voss' lines booming out of speakers "like some voice of God type of thing". Gavrilis laughs, "it was quite surreal".
Surreal it may well have been, but it worked, and "Niklas nailed it" Gavrilis says. "That was the ending sequence of the game. When I was back in Sweden, we shot the part again only with my face being performance-captured. So what you see and hear in the last scene is my facial expressions and of course my voice, but it's Niklas body movement."
As for what's next for Gavrilis now Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is out in the wild, he is looking forward to telling more stories across games and films. In the meantime, however, he is "very happy that the mother, or shall I say father of all adventure sagas, is back in gaming" once more. "It was about time," Gavrilis says.
And I will tip my fedora to that.