By Gill Pringle
“Rob Kazinski doesn’t have any friends, but he’s ranked 10th in World Of Warcraft,” Warcraft actor, Toby Kebbell, jokes of his co-star, Robert Kazinski. “He’s got a great, vast knowledge of the game, and he’s been extremely useful for us when it comes to press, and especially with the fans. We’ve got a couple of fans working on the press junkets, and they quiz us as hard as they can, and you’ve eventually just got to bow down and say, ‘I never played the game. I can’t compete.’”
A hugely successful title amongst gamers, World Of Warcraft is now getting the big screen treatment courtesy of director, Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code), and one of its most famous online proponents is in the cast. Though well known to British audiences as one of the stars of the popular soap opera, EastEnders – and to international pop culture fans thanks to his roles in HBO’s True Blood and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim – Robert Kazinski has gained a strange kind of fame in the gaming community as one of the true gun players of World Of Warcraft. “At its height, I was playing 18 hours a day,” the actor says on the set of Warcraft. “I did 18 hours a day for eight months straight. In the game, you can type ‘forward slash played’, and it tells you how many hours you’ve put into the game. Before the movie started, I had put in 463 days. That’s a year-and-a-half of constant play over a long period of time! There was a period of time when I wasn’t getting much work, and Warcraft was my saviour. But now I think I’m at like 480 days or something like that, so yeah, I’ve put in the time…I’ve definitely put in the time. I essentially gave a year-and-a-half solid of my life to that game, over the space of about three years, and it was great! I was a ranked player. We were competitive for world firsts and realm firsts, and I was really good! I was really good at that game! It was nice to be good at something!”
Kazinski’s days of serious online competition, however, are now over. “I’m not ranked at all,” he admits. “I don’t play competitively anymore. It’s hard because I played with the same 25 people for six years. These people don’t know who I am, or the fact that I’m in the film or anything like that. One of the beauties of it is the anonymity that comes with it. I’m not telling this production or the press my character names or my realm or anything like that. That’s my private world where I don’t get judged. I don’t drink because I’m worried that I’ll give away my Warcraft secrets,” he laughs. “I will never tell a soul. It’s fun to be my character and to be talking to people about the movie, and about what they’re expecting, and I’m there in the corner. It’s still very much part of my life. A lot of people go by their real names when they play the game online, but I worked on EastEnders, and that lends itself to a certain kind of tabloid fascination, and the tabloids can create a persona for you in any way that they like. I’ve never dealt well with the pressures of being in the spotlight. It’s not really for me. I shirked away from all that, and I didn’t like the fact that people would judge me upon what I had done as a career, and I found Warcraft as a place where I could be completely anonymous and where people judged me on my ability and my skill. I felt needed, and I achieved things in that game. The game was the only time that I could really be me, strangely enough, by being somebody else. I could just let go and be a child again.”
Naturally, considering its importance to him, when Kazinski heard that a movie was being made of Warcraft, he knew that he had to score a role. “There’s not much about this game that I don’t know and haven’t experienced, unfortunately,” the actor – who also toplines the sci-fi TV series, Second Coming – laughs. “So when the opportunity came up to be a part of this film…well, it wasn’t so much that they wanted me to be in it, as I wouldn’t let them make it without me being in it!”
Kazinski’s campaigning began on the set of Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim, which was being produced by Legendary Pictures, who had purchased the rights to Warcraft. The films also shared a producer in Jillian Share. “I pulled out my laptop on the set, and I pulled up Warcraft, just to kill a few hours,” Kazinski smiles. “Jillian looked at me and went, ‘Don’t do that! You know what you’re doing!’ And I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ She’s like, ‘Don’t do that! You know that we’re making Warcraft!’ And then for two years after that, I harassed Jillian on a weekly basis about what was happening, and if I could get an audition. She eventually got me an audition with Duncan, and he gave me the job. I said to Duncan early on, ‘I don’t care if you don’t give me a job… I’ll be the trash man! I’ll make you tea! I’ll do anything! You don’t even have to pay me! I’ll be there!’”
Warcraft is an epic adventure of world-colliding conflict set in a far flung corner of the universe. The peaceful realm of Azeroth stands on the brink of war as its civilisation faces a fearsome race of invaders: Orc warriors fleeing their dying home to colonise another. As a portal opens to connect the two worlds, one army faces destruction and the other faces extinction. From opposing sides, two heroes – the human, Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmell), and the towering Orc, Durotan (Toby Kebbell) – are set on a collision course that will decide the fate of their families, their people, and their home. With the aid of make-up and motion capture technology, Kazinski plays Orgrim Doomhammer, a renowned Orc warrior and right hand man to Durotan. “These things don’t happen often,” says Kazinski of landing the role. “It’s rare that you come along at the right time, and that you’re able to be seen for something that matters so much to you. I remember when I was 19, and Lord Of The Rings came out – I was so unhappy that I missed it! I was never going to be in Lord Of The Rings, and it really, really upset me. And yet, here I am, much later on and at the right time at the right place for something like this to happen to me and to be a part of something that means so much to me. It just feels like somebody’s doing me a favour.”
Warcraft will be released in cinemas on June 16. Check out our interviews with Warcraft director, Duncan Jones, and stars, Toby Kebbell, Paula Patton, and Anna Galvin.
