A Four-Hour Voice Gig Haunted Charlie Cox for a Year

"I'm not very good, because obviously, it's a skill set, but I've played it."

That's Charlie Cox, the Daredevil actor who voices Gustave in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, finally confirming to GamesRadar+ that he has, at long last, touched the game. He's played "the opening bit for a while," walked around, met some people, garnered some information. Not very well, by his own admission. And I cannot stop laughing at how perfectly this caps off one of the most endearing sagas in recent gaming history.

The timeline is absurd. Cox recorded all of his lines in roughly four hours. That's it. A single afternoon in a booth. Then Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launched, became one of 2025's most beloved RPGs, and suddenly Cox couldn't do a single panel or interview without someone asking him about a game he'd never played. In June last year, he admitted he felt like a "total fraud" whenever fans gushed about it. By July, he was at Galaxycon confessing he hadn't played it yet and needed to buy a console first, noting that the last game he'd touched was Super Mario 64 roughly three decades prior.

Then came the Game Awards nomination for Best Performance, which only cranked the pressure higher. Cox handled it with more grace than most would, repeatedly redirecting praise to Maxence Cazorla, the French actor who performed all of Gustave's motion capture. "Any nomination or credit I get, I really have to give to him," Cox said at La Conve 64 in Mexico last November. The Best Performance award ultimately went to fellow Clair Obscur co-star Jennifer English.

The Reluctant Convert

Speaking to GamesRadar+ ahead of the BAFTA Games Awards, where he's nominated again for the same role, Cox gave his most detailed gaming impressions yet. His frame of reference is FIFA 98, Mario Kart, and GoldenEye 007. Solid picks, but a long way from a turn-based RPG with layered narrative systems. What seems to have surprised him is how far storytelling in games has come. "Those games I just listed... they weren't, like, stories that were so carefully carved out and created over the course of a game," he said, calling modern games like Expedition 33 "a movie you get to participate in."

I find the whole thing charming. Cox never asked for any of this. He walked into a booth, did four hours of voice work, and walked out. A year later he's fielding questions about it at every public appearance, nominated for major awards, and feeling guilty enough to buy a console and fumble through the tutorial. The fact that he keeps insisting Cazorla deserves the credit tells you he's a decent guy caught in a situation he never anticipated.

What makes this more than just a funny anecdote is that Cox has apparently decided to lean in rather than run away. He revealed last month in an interview with YouTube channel Agents of Fandom that he's signed on for another video game project, one where he'll be "much more involved" with what sounds like full performance capture rather than voice-only work. His Clair Obscur experience, brief as it was in the booth, "opened a new avenue" for his career. So the gaming community's relentless enthusiasm didn't scare him off. It recruited him.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available now on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Cox's next game project has not been announced.