2014’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare will always be the game that made us “Press F to pay respects”, a weird moment of interactivity that undercut what was meant to be an emotional scene. Even when we’re all gone, the meme will live on.
If there’s one other thing that you’ll probably remember about Sledgehammer’s foray into future warfare, it’s that it starred Kevin Spacey. In 2014, he was on a high, and generating some memes himself, specifically as Frank Underwood in Netflix’s House of Cards. Only a few years later, allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault were made against him.
Although he wasn’t found liable in the civil lawsuit filed by his original accuser, actor Anthony Rapp, and was acquitted of sexual assault, he was dropped from several projects and the public perception of him undoubtedly changed. But for Glen Schofield, Advanced Warfare’s director, “it doesn’t taint the game”.
Chatting to us about his history with Call of Duty, he says he separates the two things. “At the time, that’s the actor I wanted.” And Schofield remembers him being great in the role, even though “videogames weren’t his thing”.
“When he was on set, and we said action, he was unbelievable. He just is a great actor, right? Then when we said cut, you could tell the videogames weren’t his thing. We had to get him a trailer. So he had a trailer outside that he would go in and he was a little bit more difficult, I would say. But boy, when you said action [Schofield exhales]. There’s a speech where he talks about democracy, and that’s just a really amazing speech.”
There were moments of awkwardness, though. “He got a little weird once in a while on the set. He would say things that just weren’t proper. We all had to fake laugh. There was some stuff.”
Sledgehammer Games wanted to make Advanced Warfare 2, and while Spacey’s character didn’t make it out of the first game alive, he could have returned in some capacity. Activision rejected the pitch, ultimately saving Sledgehammer from the backlash that would have followed.
“We were going to go there,” Schofield says, “and I’m glad we didn’t, because it was like two months before we would have shipped when the scandal broke.”