by 
Whenever an actor is attached to a film or TV adaptation of a classic video game, the question that crosses everyone's mind is typically whether they were familiar with it prior to accepting the role.
It's not a prerequisite for a good performance, of course, but it's often a comfort for fans to know there's someone on set who cares about the source material as much as they do, especially if the adaptation is taking some pretty wild swings in another direction (say, adapting a pretty straightforward fantasy hack-and-slash action game into a 20-minute-per-episode animated comedy).
With Mike McMahan and Joe Chandler's animated series based on Sega's Golden Axe having released on Paramount Plus earlier this month, interviews with the cast have started flooding the internet, and inevitably the question on everyone's lips is again whether or not the actors have played the original source material. And, to that question, it appears the Emmy Award-winning actor Matthew Rhys (who voices Gilius Thunderhead) has passed the test with flying colours.
Speaking in an interview with Screen Rant (accessed through a short clip on the NerdOutParamount Instagram), the Welsh actor (who is originally from Cardiff) said, "Golden Axe was a big part of my childhood, because I was a, you know, child of the ‘80s. I grew up playing hours of Golden Axe on the old Mega Drive, when there was one colour TV in the house. When we used to call it See-ga."
This sort of begs the question of what he made of the script, which some fans have complained on social media is too much of a departure from the source material (despite it receiving some generally complimentary reviews elsewhere). For that, we have to jump over to another one of the interviews released as part of the press junket, which comes courtesy of Bleeding Cool News, where he called the decision "a smart move" and suggested he was "pretty much all in anyway" due to his nostalgia for the 1989 Mega Drive port:
"I played this back in '89 when it came out," Rhys told Bleeding Cool News's Tom Chang. "So when I first heard it, they were like, 'Oh, we're going to do a series of it.' I was like, 'Oh, it'll be kind of probably sincere to the storyline,' and then when I read it, and it was this take, this [...] funny take on it, I thought that was such a smart move of theirs to turn it on its head in many ways.
He continued, "When I read the script, I was pretty much all in anyway, because I'm such a nostalgic fool, but when I read the take they had on it, I was like, I'm all in."
Liam McIntyre, the voice actor for Ax Battler, who also grew up with the Mega Drive, agreed: "It really lifts up the original stuff. It's really funny, but it very much honours the nostalgia of that as well. I didn't feel like I was taking [the] piss or anything. It really understood what the game was and was like, "We could do something really fun with this."
Have you had the chance to check out the show yet? Or does the fact that it is an animated comedy put you off? Let us know in the comments!