The reception to Red Dead Redemption 2 has been massive, with Rockstar's western picking up several awards and even outpacing the first eight years of its predecessor's sales in its first few weeks of release. Red Dead Redemption 2 took over eight years to develop, requiring a multitude of teams and remote studios chipping in to craft the open world experience. Rockstar Games ensured that each of these teams worked on a need-to-know basis to prevent leaks, and this practice even extended to the actors - many of whom didn't even know what game they were working on.
One of these actors is Gabriel Sloyer, who played the Mexican outlaw Javier Escuella. He had worked for Rockstar Games before on Grand Theft Auto 5, and he was quick to sign up when offered a role on the studio's next project. By the time he started, it wasn't just the name of the game he was slated to be in that was kept secret - he didn't even know his own character's name. In fact, Sloyer had to keep all details of the production secret from his family, and only started to piece together what project he was attached to as his first few months wore on:
The first thing we shot was either rescuing John from wolves - which does appear very early, though there was a part with Javier fighting off wolves with a torch in a cave, so it didn't happen exactly the way it does now - or the bar fight sequence. And I'm still going... What the f***? I'd just done GTA5 and did not know what was going on.
At that moment I did not know who I was playing. I worked it out in the first couple of months, for sure. We knew because of the boots, and because of the language we were in a Western. And it doesn't take a genius... Eventually we were like, well, what Western does Rockstar do?
Sloyer did compliment the proactive nature of the rest of the Van Der Linde gang, who compared notes and pieced together what they were working on at a faster rate. Unlike the actors for Dutch (Benjamin Byron Davis) and John Marston (Rob Wiethoff), Gabriel Sloyer didn't have history with the western franchise - while Javier was in Red Dead Redemption, at that point he was voiced by Antonio Jaramillo. Sloyer states the cast who compared notes had a better sense of what was going on, which likely helped them play the scenes to the best of their ability earlier on.
As the months turned into years, the secretive nature of the project also left Sloyer and other actors even questioning if Rockstar Games filmed fake endings to confuse them. This theory isn't without precedent, as The Walking Dead filmed 11 different death scenes for the show's seventh season, with only one of them actually happening. While Sloyer didn't explicitly state that fake endings were filmed, he did mention the studio cut many scenes that would have had certain characters going in different directions. This would tie into the rumors that Sadie Adler was originally intended to be a romantic interest for Arthur Morgan, but only Rockstar Games can say what could have been.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is available now for PS4 and Xbox One.
Source: EuroGamer