Greg Smith may look a little bit older now, but the resemblance is still uncanny. There’s the reddish hair, the bushy beard, and the stocky physique. All these years later, the Australian is still the spitting image of S.T.A.R.S (Special Tactics and Rescue Service) Alpha team member Barry Burton, a role he played almost thirty years ago for the original Resident Evil.
In 1995, Smith, along with five other foreigners living in Japan at the time took an acting gig for an upcoming game called, Biohazard. With development already underway, Capcom’s eventual horror classic already had character models and voice actors in place. But Biohazard’s director Shinji Mikami wanted to shoot some additional live-action scenes to bookend the experience and add to its sense of realism. This ask meant hiring a totally new set of actors who already resembled the characters and assembling a crew to shoot on location. The end result led to the now-iconic opening in which S.T.A.R.S Alpha Team arrives in the Arklay Mountains to investigate the whereabouts of the missing Bravo Team, as well as four different endings portraying the remaining survivors’ miraculous escape from the horrors of the Spencer Mansion. For Smith and the other actors, it was just another role; another way to make money while living in Japan. They couldn’t possibly have imagined what happened next.
In the decades following, Resident Evil (the name given to Biohazard in the west) became an extremely successful media franchise, consisting of new games, comics, and various films. Fans online inevitably wanted to know more about the live-action performers who originated the roles on screen, but Capcom never gave the actors’ full names. However, through a ton of hard work, a group of dedicated fans has gone to extraordinary lengths to track down these actors and share their enthusiasm for their work. IGN spoke to one of these fans, Fred Derf, who runs Raccoon Stars blog, a fansite detailing this endeavor, as well as some of the actors to find out their response to this renewed interest.
Becoming S.T.A.R.S
25 years later, Smith is a retired principal who spends his days riding Harley-Davidsons around the greater Albury-Wodonga area of Australia. But in the mid-90s, he lived in Japan as an assistant school principal on an exchange-teacher scholarship at a Tokyo high school. As he tells IGN, one day while visiting a friend in Roppongi, a scout for the I.M.O (Inagawa Motoko Office), a Japanese talent agency, approached him to potentially be cast in Resident Evil.
“They had made the game up already, and they had to find someone who looked like the video game character Barry Burton,” said Smith. “That rudimentary character that stifles around, stiff-legged. [...] It was close to 2000 dollars American a day or something. It was good money back in 1995. Next thing I know they’ve got me in for costume fittings, and they brought me in to get my hair cut the right way to look like Barry, and have my beard cut. They then brought me in to do some rehearsals and meet everyone because at that stage I hadn’t met anyone.”
Besides Smith, the cast for the live-action sections also included two young actresses named Inezh and Linda as Jill Valentine and Rebecca Chambers; the I.M.O employee and actor Charles Kraslavsky as Chris Redfield; and another two performers named Jason and Eric Pirius as Joseph Frost and Albert Wesker. Together they made up S.T.A.R.S, Raccoon City’s Special Tactics and Rescue Service, the group of soldiers who would contend with Umbrella’s undead experiments throughout the game. As far as we know, everyone besides Smith already had some acting experience prior to taking on their roles, with Eric Pirius, for instance, being signed to five other agencies prior to starring as Wesker.
Pirius, now a mortgage banker, told IGN, “I did a little bit of everything. TV commercials. Voices for video games. I was on Japan’s version of Broadway where I was a drunken sailor. And also industrials, like Kyoto needs an instructional video. It was kind of clapping for dollars pretty much, or yen I should say.”
Pirius first heard of the job through I.M.O, which sent his comp card (essentially a resume for actors) over to the casting director for the shoot. He then attended a short audition with 15-20 other actors in which the director asked him to read some lines and put on Wesker’s glasses. He must have done something right, because he got the part soon after and eventually found himself in wardrobe, where production dyed his natural dark hair lighter to match Wesker’s bleached blonde locks. Not everyone had as smooth a process getting into character though. Charles Kraslavsky, for example, found himself caught between bickering crew members.
Kraslavsky told the Raccoon Stars blog, “They asked me permission to dye my hair, which is naturally very dark brown, almost black, and they also asked me to grow some stubble. I remember the stylist having a very strong opinion that the character would never grow stubble, that he would be very disciplined about shaving, while the director felt very strongly that I would have stubble because we would be on the mission for several days. When they dyed my hair, they used straight peroxide, which turned my hair almost a red color. That red hair with my almost black beard stubble looked ridiculous, so they decided the character would be clean shaven.”
The pre-production process had its own ups and downs, but the unique approach to filming brought another set of challenges to the shoot, with the actors receiving little direction on how to proceed.
The Filming Process
Filming for the live-action scenes took place in late Spring across two different locations on the outskirts of Tokyo: an abandoned warehouse outfitted with a fake helicopter, and a rural area east of Mt Fuji that doubled as the exterior of the Spencer mansion.
According to the actors, the interior scenes were shot first, with Resident Evil’s director Shinji Mikami present on set for the shoot, though he wasn’t directing. Instead, Capcom hired a commercial filmmaker named Mitsuhisa Hosoki to be in charge of the filming, though very little is actually known about their directing experience outside of their work on Resident Evil. Perhaps, because of this, there was a lot of indecision between the director and their crew, with Kraslavsky being caught up in the middle.
“I remember that before we started shooting that scene the director said my white shirt was much too clean, because this was supposed to be after we had already battled.” he told the Raccoon Stars blog. “I remembered the parking lot outside was unpaved, it was dirt and gravel, and there were some puddles from recent rain. I offered to go outside and roll around in the dirt to get the shirt looking dirty and worn, and they thought it was a great idea. I rolled around in the dirt and came back. The stylist was horrified, and thought I was too dirty. The director said that I was not dirty enough, and so I went outside and rolled around some more. Looking at the video, I think the shirt is still too clean. Really it should have been much more dirty, and maybe a little bloody too.”
While Kraslavsky was rolling around in the dirt, the other actors spent much of the day waiting around. Smith, for instance, only had two scenes to shoot, including one alternative ending with Barry and Jill aboard the escaping chopper, and a video of him posing to the camera in character. The rest of the time, he spent on call.
“We basically spent the whole day in a studio, filming the imitation helicopter scenes, the introduction, and different bits and pieces,” Smith said. “All the indoor stuff was shot there in about 10 hours. We spent a lot of time sitting down drinking coffee and eating sushi [and] I only ever filmed with one person really. We spent what might have been 10 hours together — it was a long time. We got there in the morning and we didn’t leave until dark.”