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Failure is healthy, and important for being a well-rounded individual, sure, but wouldn't it be nice if no one ever had to do it in public? Or, even better in actor Alex Hernandez's case, if no one ever had to do it while wearing a motion capture suit?
Hernandez is the face of two natural disasters: the 2016 action game Mafia 3, which our Mafia 3 review says is sometimes "bland, uninspired, slight," and former GTA producer Leslie Benzies' condemned "fake open world" game from earlier this summer, MindsEye. Our MindsEye review describes the game as "an uninspired and forgettable sci-fi action adventure that feels like a Netflix movie you watch while on your phone."
"I'm not a superstitious man," Hernandez pleads in a new episode of the FRVR podcast. But prophetic moons and stars are sometimes the best explanation for more debased, more… discolored matters. So Hernandez says the – pardon me – crappy reception to MindsEye made him wonder, "'Do I have, like, the opposite of the golden touch? Like the shit-brown touch? Everything I touch turns to poop?"
"I was like, 'I might never work in a game again,'" he remembers thinking, "because one of the caveats of being the face on the box is that people rightly or wrongly will associate all of their opinions and – more importantly, their emotions – about this game with my face."
More positively, it sounds like Hernandez accepts the fact that – in his role as lead actor – so many aspects of a game are just not in his control. "It's the flip side of the blessing that it is to be the guy on the box," he admits. "I am blessed to work in a job that I love with people that are incredibly talented, and even when things go off the rails, there's some incredible work."
