Aaron Paul has been ready to plug into the world of video games. Dispatch, the first choice-filled adventure from the Telltale vets at AdHoc Studio, turned out to be the perfect opportunity — although he had never seen a game quite like it.
“I’ve been wanting to do a game for a long time,” the Breaking Bad and Westworld star tells Polygon. “I grew up in arcades, but then I just loved gaming. I would play GoldenEye over and over and over again. I thought at that time it was the greatest game of all time. And then me and my group of friends got into Halo after I moved to L.A. … When the first Resident Evil came out, I was just so blown away by the pure horror, the terror that I felt inside of my body. It is something that I’ve never experienced before, even with watching really crazy horror films.”
That long-standing affection for games is what made Dispatch — a blend of superhero satire and workplace comedy — the right fit. Paul plays Robert Robertson, the former hero known as Mecha Man, now stuck behind a desk at the Superhero Dispatch Network. “When this was presented to me, it was such an amazing package,” he says. “Jeffrey Wright was already attached […] the scripts were beautiful. They did a sizzle reel of the tone of the game, and I was like, oh my God, this is such an amazing concept. I just love the tone — action-packed, fun, funny, but also really hard-hitting drama at times that I think is going to surprise people, which I’m excited about.”
Robertson, like many of Paul’s characters, is a man defined by what he’s lost. The actor admits that’s no coincidence. “I gravitate toward characters that are going through something,” he says. “He’s a character that’s just dealing with past trauma and just fighting his way through it.” That resilience, tinged with humor, makes Robertson a natural fit for Dispatch’s oddball superhero world.
Paul says Dispatch’s superhero satire is secondary to its emotional storytelling, which is why he finally took the plunge into video game VO. “You get to know these characters more and more. You get to know their past more and more. You’re understanding where particular trauma is coming from, and some may relate to it more than others, but you’re going to be affected by it, that’s for sure. And I think people are going to really resonate with it.”
It’s easy to imagine a steadily working star like Paul zipping in and out of a few days in a recording booth to add Dispatch to his long list of credits, but Paul says nah — he put in the work. The actor says it took two years of recording to finish Dispatch.
“There was days and days and days and days of effort,” he says. “It was just so, so exhausting. I know this is just me playing my little tiny violin, but it is exhausting. But I will say, man, you got to follow the writing no matter what sort of medium. And I feel blessed to have been a part of really great animated projects in the past. This is no different. The story is at the heart of all of it.”
Maybe that’s why, when asked whether Dispatch or his work on Westworld felt more like being inside a game, Paul has big-picture thoughts. “Definitely being in Westworld felt very much like a video game,” he says with a laugh. “And it made me think maybe we are just all in a video game. I don’t know. Are we just in a weird … I don’t know!”
With Dispatch, Paul finally gets to play both sides of that question — the player and the played. And based on two years of recording, it sounds like anyone who picks up AdHoc’s debut will have all the power over which direction he goes.
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Dispatch launches on Oct. 22 for PC and PS5.