Red Dead Redemption 2 Actors Open Up About Missions Cut From The Game

Like many creative endeavors, not everything that was planned for Red Dead Redemption 2 made it into the game. The studio already spoke about how five hours of content was cut, and now the actors who play Dutch and Arthur Morgan have shared more insight on the content that was cut from the game. It sounds like the content would have been exciting, though it likely would have also made the gigantic game even longer.

Speaking to GameSpot, Arthur Morgan actor Roger Clark said Rockstar decided to cut one mission involving Arthur and Dutch. We don't know the full context of the scene, but Clark said it involved an action sequence on a train. "There was one that got cut that was kind of fun where we take out some Boston bounty hunters on a train," he said.

Benjamin Byron Davis, who plays Dutch, said of this mission: "We spent a lot of time on that. That was going to be ... oh, I hate that that got cut. It got cut because I guess they couldn't get it up to snuff."

Clark said Rockstar isn't afraid to cut content if it doesn't live up to the studio's goalposts. "That's the thing--you've got to be willing to kill your babies. You can't put everything in," he said.

Davis said he's happy in the end. "I do my best not to want what I don't have. I don't know that I need another mission with Arthur and Dutch," he said.

Davis alluded to how this mission was not the only one to be left on the cutting room floor.

"When you're working with Rockstar, you really never need to worry. Because anything that doesn't work, they don't use it," he said. "The amount of good things that they let go of is ... well, that's too much information."

Also during our interview, Davis spoke about how we was over the moon when he got the call to return as Dutch after the first game. Dutch's role in the first game was much smaller, and Davis didn't originally envision a future for the character.

"The first one was such an amazing experience, and in a lot of ways, it was a dream come true because I had been a gamer and I had a sense that actors were part of how these things were put together and I thought it looked like a good gig," he said. "But I didn't really realize when we were doing the first one how amazing it was going to be. I didn't understand the full scope of Dutch as a character."

"So when it was over, I was hopeful that I would get a phone call to come back but it wasn't a guarantee and they certainly ... there hadn't been plans when we did the original to do that. So when I got that call, I was about as excited as I could be about anything except for the fact that I couldn't tell anybody I was doing it."

Davis also shared that, on the first Red Dead, the total time he spent on the project was about six months. This included a week or two of performance capture and three hours in the voice over booth. For the sequel--which is a prequel-- Dutch's character was expanded to become one of the central figures. This required a lot of work. Davis said he did three times the amount of work on Red Dead Redemption 2 in the first week alone than he did for the entirety of the first game.

"So I booked the job, and when I finally signed the contracts and they sent me the first 100 pages of the script that I had to memorize, I was both excited--I had to get to work--but then I also became a bit intimidated because I was so proud of the first one," he said. "I honestly had some fears about, 'What if we can't do better?' I shared those fears with our director Rod Edge on the first day of performance capture, and he put me right at ease and said, 'We're gonna do better than the first one.' And I think he was right."

You can check out GameSpot's full interview with Clark, Davis, and Sadie Adler actress Alex McKenna in the video above.