When Arthur Morgan contracts tuberculosis near the beginning of Red Dead Redemption 2, you’re supposed to feel sad. Arthur’s a good guy with a troubled past, and he’s the hero of the story. Him getting a death sentence right at the start of his journey is all bad news, but from here on out I’ll only be able to react to his increasingly labored coughing fits with disgust, because now I know actor Roger Clark was actually hacking up a phlegm-filled lung in real life while recording some of those scenes.
Asked by YouTuber and games journalist Cade Onder if Arthur Morgan’s coughing fits were taxing on the actor’s throat, Clark says those scenes were “not as bad as you’d think” because they were spread out over five years and “if ever there was a really bad coughing scene, we’d always save it for the end of the day.” That’s good, but it turns out there was some serious method acting going on beyond the scenes that will forever alter how I react to Arthur Morgan’s illness.
“In five years, there’s plenty of colds and there was a lot of data that we got that was pretty damn genuine,” Clark says, confirming that he would purposefully record dialogue when he was sick with colds, lending an authenticity to those coughs that only a real-life viral infection could bring.
“I’d be like, ‘hey, I got a cold, let me get in there,” and they’re like, ‘OK’ … nice, good bit of phlegm.”
Grossness aside, I have to say I admire Clark’s work ethic. When I’m down and out, all I want to do is lay in bed and watch Seinfeld reruns, but Clark’s first instinct is to think about making Arthur Morgan sound as convincingly sick as he possibly can. That commitment paid off in an incredibly absorbing performance, even if I’ll be playing Red Dead Redemption 2 while wearing a medical mask from now on.