In the weeks before filming Dungeons & Dragons: honor among thieves, Wizards of the Coast copywriter Sarra Scherb gathered stars Regé-Jean Page, Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Sophia Lillis and Justice Smith and directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein around a table for a special D&D one-shot about a haunted party over a bottomless chasm by a sentient drill. Evidently.
Everyone played as their characters’ character classes in the movie – Page as a paladin, Pine as a bard, Rodriguez as a barbarian, Lillis as a druid, Smith as a wizard, and Daley and Goldstein as…a two-headed bird creature. According to Page, the group immediately found a rhythm.
“We all played our characters, felt that vibe, saw how you could push the other characters, what kind of energy they brought in – [D&D] is just an improvisation game for actors, you know? the actor tells Polygon. “And learning that when you do something crazy, you have Chris Pine sitting next to you [you]he’s going to take that ball and run with it, he’s going to throw it across the table, and you’ve got Michelle Rodriguez to knock it out of the park. […] That’s what we started with, the idea that if we had a good time, if we were creative, if we inhabited this world in that spirit of fun, that’s what we wanted to come out of the screen to you. ”
Image: Paramount Pictures/eOne
At this point, Page is the epitome of the chic protagonist. After he broke out as the coveted Simon Basset on Netflix Bridgertonthe 34-year-old English-Zimbabwean actor was immediately snapped up to star alongside Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans in The gray manthen thrown into the speculation ring as an obvious choice for a James Bond reboot. Are Honor among thieves character, the much holier-than-thou paladin Xenk Yendar, is another heady role, albeit one that offered Page more swordplay and screen time with Tabaxi babies than his previous roles. (Unless we missed it in The gray manin which case we will offer a correction.)
Unlike his past brushes with action spectacle, Honor among thieves takes advantage of the light-hearted aura that made Page such a star Bridgerton. But it also gives him the chance to cash in on his lifetime gambling credit. If there’s any confusion, Page is – and we say this with absolute love – a big geek. And speaking of his days playing the Diablo games, he immediately flashes back to his days when he descended under Tristram and battled Hellspawn.
“I lost about half my childhood to Diablo,” he says. “Diablo was the stunner of my day. I lost one lot from night sessions to that game.
Page says he was drawn to the Diablo series because he likes “things that free my mind and my imagination.” And wouldn’t you know it, are Diablo 2 class of choice was paladin.
Photo: Aidan Monaghan/Paramount Pictures
“I liked that mix between support classes and hero classes,” he says with full authority. “I liked that I could do a little bit of healing, a little bit of support, a little bit of buffs, but I could also do a little bit of running in my armor and doing a little bit of hack-and-slash. I like having my cake and eating it.
Page was not a child with one franchise. Though he bounced from England to Harare, Zimbabwe, and then back to London for drama school, he clocked hours at some foundational JRPGs. breath of fire, Chrono trigger, the Final Fantasy games, Lufia – “just whatever I could get my hands on,” he says. “These are the hours of my childhood. This is what forged me.
Page was forged in the fires of gaming in the late 90s/early 2000s and today brings that institutional knowledge to the set of Dungeons and Dragons. He says playing the Diablo games definitely influenced the way he thinks about and leans into roles. Honor among thieves included.
“It’s just learning that everything is: how can you create the most fantastic and unusual world to share with an audience? How can you stimulate your imagination and create a space where you can think of things that will make an audience happy? That’s the heart of this movie. What that background gave me was knowing that Dungeons & Dragons isn’t about dragons or magical swords. Yeah there’s all that but it’s about the feeling you get when you’re sitting around a table with your friends and crazy things happen that no one outside that room will ever understand again but you laugh about it and talk about it for weeks afterwards . If you get that feeling in the audience, we shoot for that.”
Of Dungeons & Dragons: honor among thieves locked up and ready for theaters, there’s only one big question left: will Page play Diablo 4 when it falls in june?
“I’m steering clear, man,” he says with a hard laugh. ‘I’ve done my time. I have a job! I have to contain it.”
Dungeons & Dragons: honor among thieves will be in cinemas from March 31.