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Kratos has never been a character who does things by halves, and his television debut appears to be following suit. Dave Bautista, who took over the role in Amazon’s live-action God of War series in August, says he has put on 20lb to play the Ghost of Sparta. Since Bautista was hardly a slip of a thing to begin with, the result has had the internet reaching for the capital letters. Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios aren’t just bolting him into the existing footage either: every scene shot with his predecessor is being redone.
That predecessor was Ryan Hurst (Sons of Anarchy), who was cast first and tore a bicep doing a stunt in late June, about four months into the shoot. Rather than wait the roughly year-long recovery, the producers recast and started again. It’s a brutal piece of scheduling, though fans of the games may point out that Kratos losing a limb’s worth of strength and carrying on regardless is practically the franchise’s whole emotional arc.
The man steering this longboat is Ronald D. Moore, who is showrunner, writer and executive producer, and is filming two seasons back to back. Moore turned Battlestar Galactica from a camp seventies relic into one of the most serious dramas TV has had, then gave us Outlander and For All Mankind, so he’s had plenty of practice with grim men, grief and family trouble on an epic scale. Those are, as it happens, the main ingredients of Santa Monica Studio’s Norse God of War games, which since 2018 have quietly swapped the series’ button-mashing Greek rage for a story about a father trying not to pass his worst habits on to his son.
The rest of the cast reads like a well-stocked mead hall. Callum Vinson plays Kratos’s son Atreus, Mandy Patinkin is Odin, Ed Skrein is Baldur, Max Parker is Heimdall, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson is Thor and Teresa Palmer is Sif. Jeff Gulka and Danny Woodburn are the bickering dwarf smiths Sindri and Brok. Best of all, Alastair Duncan, who voiced the talking head of Mimir in the games, carries on as Mimir in the flesh, or at least in the decapitated version of it.
There’s no premiere date yet, which isn’t surprising for a show that has just had to put its leading god back into the forge. The game-to-screen gold rush is meanwhile in full flood, with Fallout season three wrapped and Elden Ring, Bloodborne and Mouthwashing all in development. If Bautista keeps eating at this rate, he may yet end up playing the World Serpent as well.
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