King of the Hill and Barry star Stephen Root has confirmed that yes, that is him voicing Brian Heder in GTA 6.
Despite how much of the game we’ve seen now, Rockstar Games has kept its cards close to its chest when it comes to who is acting in GTA 6. Despite the work of internet sleuths giving us a pretty good idea, the identities of Jason and Lucia are still unknown. However, one thing was for certain from the moment the second trailer debuted back in 2025… that one old guy sounds like Buck Strickland – one of Root’s side-characters on King of the Hill, alongside his starring role as Bill Dauterive.
It’s not unusual for Rockstar to cast well-known actors in side roles, with the likes of Kyle MacLachlan, Luis Guzman, and Samuel L. Jackson appearing in the PS2 trilogy, so Root lending his voice to the game wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
Well, thanks to Associated Press, we now have our first actor confirmation, with Root confirming, “Yeah, you’re gonna see me in there.” However, Root acknowledges that it wasn’t much of a secret in the first place, saying, “From the first rollout of GTA that they were doing – almost a year ago – they had my character in there, and there are too many people who knew me from King of the Hill and my voice [laughs] so I think that secret kind of got divulged already.”
Root adds, “I’m so happy to be involved with it. It’s an amazing thing to look at.”
Personally, Root’s performance was already one of my most anticipated things about the game from the moment that second trailer dropped, and this was only heightened by a moment in the GTA 6 extended look presentation on Netflix. Around halfway through the showcase, there’s a scene where Jason and Brian are on top of a building, with Brian doing a monologue about a fairground he went to as a kid while it cuts to clips of Jason and Lucia robbing banks as Prefab Sprout’s 1988 classic, Cars and Girls, plays in the background.
It’s a story about picking the right time to get out of the life of crime, which – having seen any number of classic movies about couples in crime – no doubt bodes poorly for how the story could go. But that one-minute clip had me hooked like nothing else in the showcase, and may have completely sold me on the experience.