The Longshot: Meet Madden NFL 18's Answer to Alex Hunter

Image via EA Sports

COMPLEX: 'Longshot' is the first ever game mode of its kind for Madden, how much does it mean to you to have been such a huge part of bringing this to life?

Scott Porter: It's literally a dream come true. I played football in high school and for one year in college, then walked away...to play Colt Cruise and make it to the big league, that’s the completion of a dream for me. It's not just being part of a Madden game, Colt’s story is close to home. And when you play Madden, it’s so realistic already that playing the game feels like you’re actually playing the game. But there comes a point where graphics don’t really enhance things, they’re already so great, what more can they add? What you can do to change the way people feel about the game is injecting a storyline. The future of video games is all in the writing, it’s not graphics anymore, it’s about storytelling. To be spearheading this movement with ‘Longshot’ is really important.

JR Lemon: This is a connection between two things that I’ve committed my life too: football and acting. It’s a beautiful combination. I committed my freaking soul to football – I made it to the NFL – and acting was one of those things, too. I wanted to make people feel a type of way. I grew up in a  town that was very racially divided and it always bothered me that people weren’t getting along with each other and I was able to get on with my life only because I was ‘the athlete’ of the town. I really found acting as a way of dealing with that, of trying to bring about change. Attacking people’s empathy as opposed to their intellect. It’s amazing to be able to tell a story like this because so much of it rings true to my own life.​

How important was the Madden franchise to you growing up?

JR: I remember playing Madden since I was 11-years-old. It was a permanent fixture of my childhood and then at college, it was a bonding thing that brought all of us together. It created community amongst us guys who were living away from home for the first time. It’s a special video game.

SP: It’s been a part of the fabric of my life since it started. I had the original Madden, and I still do, with John Madden on the cover. As I grew older, I quit playing football and Madden became my outlet to still play. I play every year and it fuels my fire for NFL, especially in the off season.

With regards to the technical process behind acting, how challenging was it to work on a video game in this format, as opposed to film or TV?

JR: This is only my second experience of a video game but I thought it was incredibly challenging. Not just from the perspective of wearing loads of tech, but from having to imagine absolutely everything...on a TV show you get the benefit of props, this is completely different. You’re jumping all over the place imagining the world. And instead of doing 8 pages of lines a day, you’re shooting 33 pages. And there’s no traditional camera set up because they capture every angle at once. I was exhausted! It was heavy.

SP: But the positives of not having set design or props is that you almost become a kid again and I haven’t felt that way about a project in a long time. When you’re imagination is running wild and you’ve got to bring another actor along on that ride with you into a world that only you can see...it really is like being a kid again, it’s kind of magic. Acting can become tedious and it never felt that way with ‘Longshot’. But they should definitely have an award for motion capture actors like Andy Serkis…

JR: What he does is incredible, he’d win it every year. It’s a totally different game.

In storyline terms, as someone who’s been in the NFL, how true to life is ‘Longshot’, JR?

JR: I thought it was tremendously authentic, that’s why it was compelling. What we have in ‘Longshot’ is a football story that’s not necessarily about football. People who know football aren’t the only ones who’d enjoy it. The cool thing about ‘Longshot’ is that it also serves as a tutorial for people who don’t know football, and it’s a great time to learn with the new NFL season just starting.

SP: The cool thing for me is how closely the relationship between JR and I grew in the same way that it did with our characters on ‘Longshot’. When I got the call for this role four years ago, I was told they wanted this to rival Friday Night Lights in terms of authenticity and cinematography and I think we achieved that. We improvised a lot of this script and had ownership over it as a result, and that’s mostly because our director saw the bond JR and I had off screen – it was real and he wanted that to come across on ‘Longshot’.

It seems like an obvious thing to make comparisons between Madden’s ‘Longshot’ and FIFA’s ‘The Journey’. How closely did you look at the story of Alex Hunter last year?

SP: You know there’s a lot of conversation at EA Sports about which came first! We were actually in production way earlier. FIFA just got to go public first because of the release cycle but we’ve been working on ‘Longshot’ for four years. By the time we heard that ‘The Journey’ was happening we were already very much in character and knew exactly what we were doing, so there wasn’t much room for us to look at it as research or inspiration. I need to play it, though. It’s great to see that EA is doing story work in more than one game and it’s great to be at the tip of that spear. American Football actually lends itself to storytelling really well. These guys wear helmets and shields on the field, but underneath that they’re all very different people.

That’s a really interesting point because in the Premier League or soccer – all these players are famous, even the reserves, because they’re faces are seen and people get the chance to make emotional connections on that alone. The NFL is different. The helmets make some players almost anonymous. They’re hiding in plain sight.

JR: You’re exactly right, most players aren’t known and ‘Longshot’ is an opportunity for some of their life stories to be told. Most people think football players are these big, brute, emotionless jocks and as a result, they’re actually quite unrelatable. ‘Longshot’ makes these guys relatable because you’re seeing a player face the same everyday struggles with family, friends and personal worth that we all do.

SP: A good parallel with the Premier League is the NBA. You see how those guys interact with the crowd and their teammates, you get a sense of their personality and it doesn’t really change too much from on-court to off-court. When you saw Kobe Bryant play, you knew what sort of person Kobe Bryant was. With NFL players, you’re never actually that sure. I think ‘Longshot’ is trying to tell that story.

Scott Porter and JR Lemon were speaking at NFL UK’s season kick off event. Porter stars in the all new ‘Longshot’ story mode in EA SPORTS Madden NFL 18, out NOW on PS4 and Xbox One. To order your copy, head to easports.com.