Troy Baker

• 1. Introduction

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  Troy Baker is an American voice actor and musician who holds the record for the most acting nominations at the BAFTA Games Awards. He has seven of them, spread between 2013 and 2026. That is a long run for someone whose face most players have never seen. His voice has carried soldiers, thieves, superheroes, villains and an archaeologist in a fedora through some of the best known video games ever made. Yet before any of that, he sang and played rhythm guitar in a rock band. This documentary asks how a performer gets from anime dubbing studios to the center of blockbuster games. It asks what links a grieving father in a ruined America to a masked vigilante in Gotham. And it asks how one announcement on social media in 2022 turned into a public argument about voices, ownership and technology.

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• 2. Anime Roots

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  Christopher Sabat is the name that opens the door to Baker's professional career in voice acting. Sabat recruited him to work at Funimation, where his first job was the English adaptation of the anime Case Closed. Baker had been doing radio spots before that, so the booth was not unfamiliar. Funimation put him into a steady stream of dubs. He worked on Bleach, Dragon Ball Z, Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Naruto, Naruto: Shippuden and the Funimation dub of One Piece.

  The credit list from this period reads like a catalog of cult favorites. In Naruto: Shippuden he voiced Yamato and Pain, among other characters. In Code Geass he played the prince Schneizel el Britannia. In Soul Eater he gave voice to Excalibur and White Star. In Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood he took over as the second incarnation of Greed. Later he played the title fighter in the Netflix series Baki.

  The anime work also reached into games. Baker voiced Kanji Tatsumi in the Persona 4 video game and again in Persona 4: The Animation, where he appeared in episodes 1 through 12. He gave Yuri Lowell his English voice in Tales of Vesperia, and then in the film Tales of Vesperia: The First Strike. Eventually the dubbing studios were not the only place that wanted him. A move to Los Angeles brought animated superhero series, and games soon followed.

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• 3. Breakout Roles

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  A tactical shooter series called Brothers in Arms was Baker's first step into the game industry, where he voiced Sergeant Matt Baker. He later described the move as stumbling from one job into the next, which he called his first snowball effect. Actors were being pulled into games more and more, and he followed the pull.

  Then came 2013. In one year he voiced Booker DeWitt in BioShock Infinite and provided both the voice and the motion capture for Joel in The Last of Us. Both games drew critical acclaim, scored above 90 percent on GameRankings and Metacritic, and sold widely. At VGX 2013, Baker was nominated for both performances. He won for The Last of Us.

  Entertainment Weekly took notice as well. Its Best of 2013 issue named him the best breakout actor in games. The magazine pointed to Joel and Booker, along with his turn as the Joker in Batman: Arkham Origins.

  The momentum carried forward. In 2016, he played Sam, the older brother of Nathan Drake, in Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. He returned to the character a year later in Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Earlier, in 2011, he had already voiced Siris, the hero of the mobile series Infinity Blade. The next chapter looks at the darker and stranger parts he took on.

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• 4. Heroes and Villains

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  Pagan Min, the flamboyant tyrant of Far Cry 4 in 2014, shows how far Baker will bend his voice. The same year he was Talion, the grim protagonist of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, a game that earned a 9.3 rating from IGN. Talion returned in Middle-earth: Shadow of War in 2017, and Baker also worked as a motion capture director on that sequel.

  Vincent Brooks in Catherine, from 2011, earned him a NAVGTR award entry for lead performance in a drama. Rhys in Tales from the Borderlands brought a comedy entry from the same organization in 2015. Delsin Rowe in Infamous Second Son gave him another drama entry. Each role asked for a different register.

  His later work leaned into legend. He voiced Revolver Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain in 2015, with motion capture. In 2019 he played Higgs Monaghan in Death Stranding, a performance listed among his BAFTA entries for a supporting role in 2020. He returned to Higgs in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach in 2025.

  In 2024 came Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, again with motion capture. It earned him an acting entry at the New York Game Awards in 2025. The role of Jack Pepper in Mouse: P.I. For Hire followed in 2026, and the BAFTA tally reached seven that year with entries for both leading and supporting roles.

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• 5. Gotham and Marvel

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  Few actors have worn the cowl as often as Baker in games. He voiced Batman in Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, Lego Dimensions, Batman: The Telltale Series and Batman: The Enemy Within. In the Telltale games he also played Bruce Wayne, and in the first one, Thomas Wayne.

  The unusual part is that he also played the villain. In Batman: Arkham Origins, he was the Joker. He is among the few performers to have voiced Batman and the Joker, as well as all three of the major Robins. Tim Drake appears in Batman: Arkham City, Dick Grayson as Nightwing in Injustice: Gods Among Us, and Jason Todd in Batman: Arkham Knight. In Arkham Knight, Jason Todd becomes the Red Hood and the main antagonist.

  Baker kept returning to these characters on screen too. He played the Joker in Batman: Assault on Arkham and in the two-part Batman: The Long Halloween. He was the Joker again in Batman: Arkham Shadow, where he also voiced Harvey Dent as Two-Face.

  Marvel gave him a second franchise. The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes was an early animated series for him in Los Angeles. He then played Hawkeye and Loki in Ultimate Spider-Man and Avengers Assemble. Loki later appeared in the game Marvel Rivals.

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• 6. Beyond the Booth

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  In May 2018, Baker and fellow voice actor Nolan North began hosting a weekly YouTube series called Retro Replay. The show lasted less than two years in its original form. By April 2020, an apparent disagreement over its future direction led Baker to leave and start a series of his own.

  His acting also stepped away from the microphone. In the miniseries Comanche Moon, he played Pea Eye Parker. He was cast as David in Iron Lung in 2026. In the television adaptation of The Last of Us, he appeared as James in the episode titled When We Are in Need, a small role in a world he had helped to define.

  The credits also include The Imposter, where he is listed as Jerome and as a producer, and The Phoenix Incident, where he played Ryan Stone. In 2025 he lent his voice to the audiobook of Radiant Black. He appeared as himself at DC FanDome and narrated a War Thunder update trailer in 2023.

  One episode of his career, though, did not work out as planned. It began with a short message online in January 2022.

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• 7. The Voiceverse Backlash

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  On the 14th of January 2022, Baker posted an announcement about a partnership with Voiceverse, a blockchain-based company. Reaction was negative at once. His tone made it worse, because the post ended with the line "You can hate. Or you can create."

  Later that same day, the story turned. The developer of 15.ai, a free, non-commercial text-to-speech application, was known simply as 15. Screenshots of log files that 15 posted showed that Voiceverse had used 15.ai without permission or credit. The company had generated audio from voices belonging to characters in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. It then pitched them up so they would be harder to recognize and sold the results as non-fungible tokens.

  News publications and AI watchdog groups universally described the episode as theft and plagiarism. On the 31st of January 2022, Baker acknowledged that his original announcement may have been "antagonistic." He ended the partnership, two weeks after it began.

  The episode did not disappear. In 2023, /Film called the partnership one of his less reputable roles. In January 2026, Eurogamer returned to it when covering Baker's comments about generative AI. The outlet wrote that the Voiceverse deal had brought "fierce backlash" because of his "provocative marketing."

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• 8. Music and Home

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  Before acting took over, Baker fronted a band. He was the lead singer and rhythm guitarist for the alternative rock group Tripp Fontaine. In 2004, the band released its debut album, Random Thoughts on a Paper Napkin. The radio single from it was "Burning Out." Years later, a Star Ocean game credited him under the name Tripp Fontaine.

  On the 14th of October 2014, he released his first solo album, Sitting in the Fire. His backing band took the same name. On the 6th of October 2017, that group released its second album, Moving Around Bias, under the new name Window to the Abbey. Singles from that period include "Water into Wine" and "The Promise" in 2017, then "Breathe" in 2020.

  Music also reached into his games. He sang "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" with Courtnee Draper in BioShock Infinite, and the song won attention at VGX 2013. In The Last of Us Part II, he performed "Wayfaring Stranger" with Ashley Johnson. In The Medium, he sang "Fade" with Mary Elizabeth McGlynn.

  In 2012, he married photographer Pamela Walworth, who is also from Dallas. They live in Los Angeles. Their son was born in 2018.

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