Phelps is played by Aaron Staton, who you probably know best as Mad Men’s Ken Cosgrove—a performance that played a large role in landing him the part. "I can’t remember the exact one-sentence pitch, but I think it was something like ‘L.A. Confidential meets Grand Theft Auto,’" Staton told me in a phone interview last week. "They were casting actors who had an understanding of the period. Mad Men took place in the '60s and not the '40s—but 20 years is a lot shorter to travel than 70."

Staton’s performance was achieved via then-cutting edge motion capture: long days of sitting in a room alone and reciting dialogue into those 32 cameras, which faithfully translated his performance into the actual game. "It was so much material," says Staton. "There were 5,000 script pages. I never read the whole script beforehand, because with 5,000 pages, how could I? Eight pages is a big day in television—and here, we were doing 25 or 30 pages a day. We were flying through it—just two or three takes for every line."

This exacting motion-capture technique also led to L.A. Noire’s buzziest feature: the interrogation scenes, in which Cole Phelps grills suspects and witnesses. In theory, the digitized performances were supposed to be detailed enough that players could gauge whether or not a character was lying just by studying their face. In practice, the process is inexact at best. It’s difficult to judge the characters’ expressions, and difficult to know which of Cole’s three very divergent reactions you should apply to these very nuanced moments. (In the original release, your options were "Truth, Doubt, or Lie"; in the remaster, they’ve been changed to "Good Cop, Bad Cop, or Accuse," which is only marginally less confusing.)

L.A. Noire’s interrogations were even difficult enough to thwart the game’s star. "I should play [the remastered version]," Staton says. "I played some of [the original] when it came out. I was actually really terrible at the game. I sat down with my wife and played it, and she said, 'I can’t believe you’re not better at this. Don’t you know which one to choose? Didn’t you spend months doing this?' And she’s not wrong. I should be better at it."

Staton has remained invested in gaming since starring in L.A. Noire in 2011. He plays TT Games’ Lego video games with his kids, and he’s just about to dive into Call of Duty: WWII. "It’s 87 percent loaded here on my Xbox," he says. (Staton is a longtime Call of Duty fan, and he plays online—so yes, there’s a non-zero chance you’ve ended up on the wrong end of Ken Cosgrove’s crosshairs.) And while he wasn’t asked to shoot or record any new scenes for the rerelease of L.A. Noire, he’d be interested in performing in a video game again. "I think that the technology we used… it must be so completely different," Staton says. "It would have been different just a year from then. I would be curious how it would work now."