MJB: I hope so, I hope so. It’s the weight, y’know, because he’s carrying this…it’s a big sword.

It’s huge.

MJB: It’s not a real metal sword, you can move it around, but he plays that weight, and he plays the pain, and I remember, he’s on the set, it was maybe the first couple days we were working with Roberto, and we’d done the first movie five years ago, and I wasn’t involved and that was Sammy, Sammy was there, and I saw Sammy scuttling onto the set, and saying to him, ‘More pain, more pain!’ Seriously, and just to play that and suddenly it’s like he remembered what it was and he just dropped and he played the pain of being that creature again. It’s fun.

Adelaide is such a wonderful discovery, and I know the story about how you bumped into her at Sundance, but now we see her on the screen…

SH: You know, when I met her, I felt the same physical resemblance with the character of the video game. I was looking to the cover of the…he was casting in LA, and then I went to Sundance because there were lots of agents I cannot meet in LA…and I see this lady and I said, ‘Wow, she looks like the cover.’ …And obviously, I went to see her and I said, ‘Can I show you this picture? Are you coming to LA? Would you go to see my director to be cast to be in the movie?’ And she told me, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure, sure,’ not believing anything I was saying.

MJB: ‘Hey, I’m a film producer.’

SH: But you know, what is important is that she was in a Japanese movie, she was Australian like Radha Mitchell, and she knew the world of Japan, because the video game comes from Japan, and she was speaking French and she lived in France, and I said, ‘There is three areas that we are hitting together,’ plus they look alike, so I said, ‘You should come.’ And she came.

What about Kit?

MJB: Oh well, Kit, we spent a lot of time looks for guys. Kit was one of the very first lads that came in to meet me in London, and from that first day, I said, ‘It’s gonna be Kit.’

Was that before Game of Thrones?

MJB: He’d done Game of Thrones, but it hadn’t been broadcast, so he still, his only real credit was what was on the stage in London. Game of Thrones, ‘Hey I’m looking forward to that, how’s it gonna be?’ ‘I think it’s gonna be fine.’ Quite an understatement. But he…you can tell really, really quickly when an actor walks into a room, you do the full audition, you give them the full time, but I can tell in ten seconds if it’s, if this is the person I’m gonna warm to, like, they’re gonna have the talent to do what I want them to do and Kit had all of those things so I, for me it was very easy, it was just, he stared forefront of my mind through all the other fifty-odd other actors we finally met and it was always Kit. Partly, he’s a very handsome young man, as an actor he’s got real subtlety and flexibility, and the nature of the character that he plays, although it’s Vincent, who is a character from the third game, it’s really a very, very faint similarity between the two of them. I took this Vincent character and did something totally different with him, something some of the fans will obviously be a bit annoyed about, but I needed to get a guy who we liked, this notion of ‘love interest’ has to be played. It doesn’t ever go where you think it’s going to go, but that’s what you’ve got to think the job of his character is to be, and it becomes something different. So, yeah, with Kit, he’s a talented young guy, and clearly he’s a big name now, certainly when you’re walking through Comic-Con with him.