
Video games have been home to a number of similarly affecting mo-cap performances over the last few years, with masterpieces like “Death Stranding” and “The Last of Us Part II” offering some of the richest parts that a modern actor could hope to find in any medium, but Schiff’s work here just hits different. It’s even more jarring to see the immediate effect that Schiff’s presence has on the story, as his deceptively relaxed (and deeply sinister) take on the most powerful of the gods helps ground this convoluted soap opera in raw human emotion from start to finish. While “Ragnarök” can sometimes be guilty of straining to look and feel like a 30-hour Marvel movie, it manages to get away with that for one simple reason: The MCU has never had a bad guy this good. Needless to say, it’s pretty jarring to see Toby Ziegler from “ The West Wing,” Elijah Wood’s dad from “Deep Impact,” and a middle-aged Jew from New York (via Bethesda) stride into the heart of a Norse mythology and bend the entire world to his whims. Well, technically he’s Odin, but unlike the rest of the characters in this photorealistic video game, the Allfather has unmistakably been modeled after the actor whose motion-capture performance brought him to life. And even if you haven’t played the previous “God of War,” odds are that you’ll instantly know who he is too: acclaimed character actor Richard Schiff.

“You know who I am,” the stranger announces with a threatening softness that makes it obvious he isn’t asking.
GOD OF WAR ODIN HOW TO
How to Make a Modern Period Piece for $5 Million: Behind the Scenes of ‘BlackBerry’Ītreus opens the door to find a slender balding white guy in his late sixties, complete with a thick beard, a severe eyepatch, and a coterie of ravens flapping around him. The wall of ice between Kratos (Christopher Judge) and Atreus (“Mid90s” breakout Sunny Suljic) has only gotten more frigid now that the boy is a bonafide teenager, and with Fimbulwinter blanketing Midgard under mile-deep sheets of white snow - the cold snap heralding the deadliest battle the world has ever known - it seems unlikely that things between father and son will begin to thaw anytime soon. That’s when they hear someone knocking outside the hidden safe house where our heroes are trying to hole up until Ragnarök blows over. The prologue of “ God of War Ragnarök” peaks with a dramatic moment that fans of Sony’s blockbuster video game franchise have been waiting for since it was teased at the end of the previous installment in 2018: The reveal of the saga’s big bad, a Norse deity whose obsessive desire to rip apart the fabric of fate itself has severely complicated the former God of War’s quest to scatter his wife’s ashes from the highest peak in all the nine realms and establish an emotional bond with the child he seldom refers to by name.
