Interview with Nolan North
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Nolan North
American voice and screen actor known as Nathan Drake in Uncharted, Desmond Miles in Assassin's Creed, Ghost in Destiny and Deadpool in Marvel games.
Source: What Would Kay Say? on YouTube
These answers are taken from A Conversation With: Nolan North on What Would Kay Say?'s YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with voice acting?
The first one ever was something called Interstate '82, and I played a character named Hinckley. It was an Activision game. This is before I was even... I was bartending and catering at the time. The manager I had at the time sent me over on a Saturday, and it was an empty parking lot at Activision in Santa Monica, California, looking through the windows that are all blacked out. I knock on the door, finally somebody comes and gets me, we walk through, and it's everybody's day off, and I'm going, am I being pranked? We get to the back and there's this little booth and there's just two other guys there. They had heard my Christopher Walken impression, and I did this Hinckley in that kind of vein. I don't even know the game. They probably gave me like 250 bucks or something like that. It just seemed so amateur. But that was technically the first video game that I ever did.
When did you start doing voice over work?
The first one professionally, through my agent, was Maximo vs. Army of Zin, and I played the Baron. I remember that one so well, because typically when you record, you're in the booth, and there's a panel of glass, and the engineer and the director sit on the other side and talk you through your headphones. This particular place was on La Brea and Hollywood Boulevard, in this office building, but I was in this room with a little camera and a microphone in the middle of the room, and that's it. The engineer and the directors were down the hall. And I feel like I'm being pranked again: am I in a room yelling like some baron?
But that was the first game where they sent me a copy, and it was an actual SAG acting contract, so a legit professional deal, where the other one was sort of like, come on in on Saturday. This one was made, distributed and sold. So those two are both technically my first.
What was a great moment for you as a voice actor?
I had kind of said, I don't want to do a cameo if it just doesn't make sense. It has to have a punchline. You just don't want that random guy bumping into me, "Can I get you a drink?" What's the point of that? The way the scene was originally written, the writers said it was just kind of a placeholder. We did it a couple of times, and something about it didn't feel enough of me passing the baton to the new young Nathan Drake. And we ended up coming up with just a little nod: hey, how you doing, yes, that happened to me. I'm still Nathan Drake in my universe of gaming.
I thought it was fantastic. The whole concept of visiting the adventures of Nathan Drake in a time frame that we as gamers never got to experience makes it unique, and it's not taking away from anything that we did in the gaming space. It just nods its head to it.
What advice do you have for new voice actors?
My favorite thing to tell people: if you're a good chef working in a restaurant and the restaurant closes, you're still a good chef. People say, how do you deal with the rejection? Well, there is no rejection. I never get rejected, because the way I look at it, it's not that I was bad, it's that somebody else was more right for the role. I know for a fact there were better actors technically than I was who auditioned for Nathan Drake, but I was the right fit for whatever reason. When you audition, you don't know what the rest of the cast looks like.
Your job is to go out and give them your interpretation of the material they give you, and do it the best that you feel you could do it. So when you press send, you go, I just sent them my take on that. The biggest thing I would tell any actor: love your audition. Be proud of that. You've already won. Getting the job is gravy. And remember, that producer or that director really likes you, and then you come up on another audition and they go, oh, he read for this show, take him. You never know. So always do your best in every audition.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your demo list.
I gave up a very, very big home run to Mo Vaughn in college. He ended up playing in the pros for quite a while, a fantastic hitter. In college they didn't have wood bats, we used metal, and Mo Vaughn hit one, I'm guessing, 700 feet off me. We won the game like 23 to one, and all anybody ever remembers is the one run.
When you do something for so long and then you get around a group of guys who are just better than you, it was hard at the time. There'd be guys who would roll into a game after drinking all night at a bar, a little hungover, and they were better on their worst day than I was. I'm very proud that I got to the level I got to, but I love what I do so much more than I would have enjoyed that.
What are some of your professional goals for the future?
The one that I'd really like to revisit, and I've had conversations with Marvel, is Deadpool. That whole video game was cut short because of budget and the economy at the time, but it somehow became this cult hit. With the success that Ryan Reynolds has had with the movies, I don't understand why we can't get that done. I'd like to do a Deadpool game, and I'd like to act in it and direct it in the vein of an Uncharted: do it as a narrative story, make it like one of Ryan's movies, but a playable game. These characters that really have no limitations and no consequences to anything they do, and are a little tapped in the head, are always a challenge and a lot of fun for an actor. I'm not technically a writer, but I have some ideas. Star and direct in it. I'm going to keep the conversations up and see if I can't make it happen.
I'm going to do this until I drop. I want to keep doing what I do until I drop, whether it's in front of the camera or behind a microphone.
Nolan North's Full Biography
Nolan North is an American voice actor from Connecticut who is known for voicing Nathan Drake from the Uncharted video game series, the Space Core from Portal 2, Deadpool in many Marvel cartoons and video games, Penguin from Batman: Arkham City, N. Gin from Crash Bandicoot, Desmond Miles from Assassin's Creed and Ghost from Destiny after replacing Peter Dinklage.