Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's Gustave actor Charlie Cox admits he was "completely ignorant" to the passion fans would feel towards his character.
Be warned, there are spoilers ahead for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – specifically, events that take place at the end of the RPG's first act. Proceed with caution if you've not got that far yet!
Speaking in an interview with GamesRadar+ ahead of the 2026 BAFTA Game Awards, we asked Cox if he had any idea how grand Gustave's iconic final scene would feel to players when he was recording it. After all, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is full of emotional moments, but his death scene is by far one of the most shocking and genuinely devastating. Despite that, Cox still didn't see it coming.
"Absolutely none," he admits. "That's just the honest truth. Absolutely not. I mean, I genuinely was completely ignorant to the level… I would say, the type of passion. It didn't occur to me that people could feel as strongly about a character generated for a computer game as they could for a character that appears in a television or movie that you've created. It didn't occur to me that fans and audiences could be as emotionally stirred by both. So that's been really shocking to me."
After all, as the star of Daredevil – Matt Murdock – Cox has seen plenty of people get emotionally invested in characters from the silver screen, but this was something new.
"I attend Comic Cons all around the world, and up until recently, 95% of the people that come to meet me, they want to meet me because of my involvement with Daredevil," he continues. "And suddenly, in the last six, eight months, I've had a whole new fan base, it seems, of people who are as obsessed with the gaming industry and with characters from computer games as the other fans are about film and television. So that was shocking to me."
It's fair to say that his involvement in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has given Cox fresh insight into the world of games, anyway, with him also telling us that especially now he's played some of Sandfall's RPG himself, "I can see why people respond so well to these games and these characters when they're done well, because it's an emotional experience." He's even involved in another game right now, which he says is in "the very early stages," so we'll just have to wait and see what that ends up being.
