I'm *always* asking for this…
Actor Elias Toufexis has been busy in recent years, showing up as space spy Kenzo in The Expanse, delightful rubber forehead alien L’ak in Star Trek: Discovery, and The Penguin in Gotham Knights, among other roles. According to the actor though, he hasn’t heard anything about reprising the role most gamers know him for: Deus Ex prequel series protagonist Adam Jensen.
(Image credit: Elias Toufexis)
“Yeah, as happy as I am to be busy, I wish I was even more busy on a new Deus Ex” Toufexis wrote on Twitter. “I am not under any NDA for Deus Ex because no one has called me about it. Truly.”
As PC Gamer news lead Andy Chalk put it, “This one hurts.” Like Jay Anthony Franke as JC Denton in the original game, Toufexis did an amazing job squeezing warmth and humor out of a be-trench coated, sunglasses at night-wearing lug who knocks guys out and hides them in vents for a living.
The black and gold neo-Renaissance of the Deus Ex prequels makes for an incongruous continuity with the original games, but they’re a fantastic bit of sci-fi on their own, and Toufexis as Jensen is the weirdly relatable, down horrible for an ex-girlfriend who performed human experiments on him emotional core of the whole experience.
It’s not necessarily a death knell for Jensen though—back in November, sources told Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier that a new Deus Ex was “very very early” in development. Fast forward nine months and you could maybe knock off just one of those “verys” when it comes to the alleged next Deus Ex’s development progress. While Toufexis would have a central role and a lot of lines to record if he was the protagonist of a new Deus Ex, actually recording voice lines comes pretty late in a game’s development after the script’s been finalized.
At the same time, it’d probably never be too early to start looping in and locking down central, recognized talent, and who’s to say that the next Deus Ex game wouldn’t be a reboot? Given modern development cycles, it could very well be a gap of ten years or more between the previous game, 2016’s Mankind Divided, and the launch of this next project (god damn that makes me feel old). That’d be a damn shame though—Mankind Divided really felt like the middle part of a trilogy that wasn’t allowed to be finished.
Eidos Montreal’s most recent release was Guardians of the Galaxy, a game that surprised us with its wit and warmth at a time of peak Marvel oversaturation (I’m getting tired of all this stuff, anyway). The studio changed hands from Square Enix to The Embracer Group last August, and does not seem to have been affected by a recent wave of layoffs and studio closures at the mega publisher.
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