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Hideo Kojima originally wanted to use actor Kurt Russell, who portrayed the character Snake Plissken in the action films "Escape from New York" and "Escape from L.A.", as the voice of Naked Snake instead of voice actor David Hayter, who had previously played the role of Snake in Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2. After Russell turned the role down, Hayter stated in a 2016 Game Informer interview he was given the part only after re-auditioning for the role:

"I had to re-audition for Metal Gear 3 to play Naked Snake...I heard that Kojima asked one of the producers on Metal Gear 3 to ask Kurt Russell if he would take over for that game. He didn't want to do it."

The reason Hayter revealed this information at all was because of Kojima replacing him with Kiefer Sutherland as the voice of Snake in Metal Gear Solid V.

Russell revealed in a 2024 interview with GQ that the role was one of many throughout his acting career that he turned down because he did not want to financially or creatively expand off of previously-established characters created by different people for a completely different project, in this case, imitating Snake Plissken through Naked Snake:

"You got to understand that from my point of view, whether it's Elvis, or Snake Plissken, or Jack Burton, or R.J. MacReady, that was that project, that was that thing, you get into that mindset, you create that, you wanna make that world happen… I used to do interviews when Elvis was coming out and they would say "Come on, do a little Elvis for us!" and, you know, it's like, it doesn't work that way. You don't just slide in and out of Elvis, you go to work on it, you refine it, and then you do it, and you get paid for that. I come from a different era. I wasn't interested in expanding financially off of something that we had created or that I had created in terms of a character. And I get business people, sure: "Oh, we could do this with that, we could do this with that, or we could do this with that." You know, and I look at it and I go "That's not written by John [Carpenter]. That doesn't smell right, John's not here to do this with, w-why am I… I'm not gonna do that." Let's go do something new. Let's go do something fresh. Let's go create another iconic character rather than saying "What can we bleed off of this iconic character?" you know? You don't look at them as iconic characters, I mean like, you refer to them as that if they become that, you're just doing a day- you're on a day-to-day, running it, having a good time and trying to make it work."
person Pogue-Mahone calendar_month March 30, 2016

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