10 years later, Danville native still making most of star turn in ‘Grand Theft Auto V’

 THE FOLLOWING IS A NEWS GAZETTE STORY BY JENNIFER BAILEY

ABOVE: Danville native Ned Luke and his character from ‘Grand Theft Auto V,’ Michael De Santa

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DANVILLE — Through many struggles and a lot of ups and downs in his acting career, Ned Luke said he’s remained “Danville tough” — and that enabled him to land a main-character role in one of the biggest video-game franchises of all time.

The 65-year-old is still traveling the world and participating in conventions more than 10 years after the release of “Grand Theft Auto V,” in which he voices retired bank robber Michael De Santa, one of the three lead characters — and the first introduced in the game.

The stats for the seventh main installment in Rockstar Games’ action-adventure series (2002’s “Vice City” and 2004’s “San Andreas” did not have numbered titles), released in September 2013, remain astronomical. The game broke industry sales records and became the fastest-selling entertainment product in history. It has sold more than 200 million copies and earned more than $8.5 billion worldwide. It has also created controversy with its violence and other depictions.

“We are bigger than ‘Avatar,’ ‘Gone with the Wind,’” Luke said, referencing two of the highest-grossing films of all time. “This game is chasing $10 billion.”

The game earned $800 million its first day and $1 billion in its first three days, according to industry records.

A sequel, “Grand Theft Auto VI,” is set to be released in late 2025 for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

“It is going to blow everything we did away,” Luke said.

“GTA VI” will feature the franchise’s first female protagonist, and could earn $1 billion its first day, according to entertainment reports.

Luke said he can’t say if he has anything to do with it.

“If I tell you, I’d have to kill you,” he said, referencing the non-disclosure agreement he signed.

It’s been a late-career whirlwind for Luke, who has been making the rounds at conventions after the 10th anniversary. He was at Pop Con in Indianapolis in April and will be at Pop Con in Louisville, Ky., in August. He signs autographs, takes photos with fans and talks at panel discussions about the game.

“When this game first came out, in an interview, someone asked me ‘How do you feel about being in this unbelievably successful game?’” Luke said. “I said, ‘I’m riding my 15 minutes as long as I can.’

“It’s bigger now for me than when it first came out,” he added. “It’s led me into so many other things. I go to comic cons all over the world.”

He also livestreams and has a 10th-anniversary play-through of the game on his YouTube channel, where he has 258,000 subscribers.

“The fans are just unbelievable,” Luke said.

Those fans have nicknamed him “Big Daddy.” He has “Big Daddy’s Table” videos and a Discord server called “Big Daddy’s Playground.”

He said he enjoys sitting around and talking with fans.

“We’ve built a really cool, tight community,” Luke said. “It’s my way of giving back. The fans are the game. It’s not me.”

He said the actors who play Trevor Philips and Franklin Clinton, the other two leads in the single-player story, feel the same.

Luke added that even now he’s just being discovered by some people, even from Danville, who tell him “I didn’t know you were from my hometown.”

Hometown roots

Luke was born in Danville to parents Fred and Cindy and now lives in Atlanta, along with a lot of his family.

He has some cousins in Danville, and his brother, Steve, has a farm in nearby Covington, Ind.

Ned Luke is married to Amy and they have one son, Max, also known as Bubba, who is about to start his senior year as a pitcher on the baseball team at Emmanuel University in Georgia.

Playing and coaching sports have been big parts of the Luke family’s legacy in Danville and elsewhere.

Ned Luke played football and acted in plays prior to graduating from Danville High School in 1977 and going on to the University of Illinois, where he also ran track. He injured his leg in his senior year of high school.

He said he wanted to be an actor, and took a drama class at Danville High taught by Dale Farrell. He said there were a lot of girls in the class and he thought it would be easy, and he was pretty much straight-A student anyway, and found it fun.

“We started doing all these skits,” he said, including many from “The Carol Burnett Show.” “It was just fun.”

Farrell wrote in Luke’s yearbook that he really should consider entertainment as a profession.

Fellow Danville teacher Wayne Crawford also encouraged Luke when he was sports editor for the school newspaper, the Maroon & White. Luke said after the senior play, “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” Crawford also told him he should go into entertainment.

Luke said his mother’s father was also an actor, which probably made his mom a little gun-shy about her son going into the same line of work, but he said that’s what he wanted to do.

But it took him about 10 years to become a professional actor.

He decided to go for it and make the move to Hollywood, he said, and about halfway through Nebraska, he pulled off on the side of the road and questioned himself. He said he didn’t know anyone in Los Angeles, but decided to keep going, reasoning that if acting didn’t work out, he could at least do standup comedy.

He initially got a job at a formal-wear shop, and it was far from glamorous.

“It’s a grind. It has to be a calling, or don’t even mess with it,” Luke said.

He said he was working at the Glendale Galleria mall and lived in a one-room apartment with a pull-out couch, splitting the rent with someone else because he couldn’t afford it. The cockroaches were horrible, he said.

“We would go to the Comedy Store and Laugh Factory and do open-mic nights,” Luke said. He was an unpaid regular at the Comedy Store, doing six-minute slots.

He eventually started doing a lot of commercials.

He said he thought his career was going pretty well after he reached about 100 commercials for brands such as Cheerios and Burger King, but he was still struggling and still going broke. After his son was born, he moved back to Danville for a couple years, opening The Varsity Room restaurant downtown and doing concessions at Danville Stadium while Max was younger.

Life-changing audition

After leaving the business for a few years, he then tried working out of New York. About a month after making that move in 2009, he got the call to audition for “GTA V.”

He told his agent he wasn’t a voice actor, and asked who Rockstar Games was. As it turns out, he was familiar with the franchise.

“I had played all those games. I was a gamer,” Luke said, but he had never paid attention to the developer.

By that time, “I was feeling pretty good about myself” as an actor, Luke said, with roles on the TV series “Law and Order” and “Boardwalk Empire” under his belt.

Video-game voice acting and motion capture would be much different.

“They sent me the material, and as soon as I read it, I went, ‘Nobody else is going to do this.’ The Danville kid came out,” Luke said.

He went into the audition thinking the part was perfect for him, and no one else was getting it.

“I just knew: ‘This is my gig,’” Luke said.

After the audition, he didn’t hear anything for a long time. Usually, he would finish an audition and not worry about it, figuring he’d either get a call back and get the job or not.

At the time, the game also had a fake name, so he didn’t know it was part of the “Grand Theft Auto” franchise.

He got a callback months later, where was called in to act with the other actors up for the other protagonist roles, including Steven Ogg, who plays Trevor. There were two “Michaels” and two “Trevors,” and they had an act-off, Luke said.

When they were handed new material to learn at the last minute for the audition, the other “Michael” actor started to panic and wasn’t prepared for that, Luke said.

“Again, that’s where the Danville kid came out,” Luke said. “I looked at him and said, ‘This is good,’” talking about the new material.

He said he thought to himself about the other actor, “You’re going to get your ass kicked,” He said he knew he was going to get the job.

He said he was also sure he and Ogg worked the best together at the audition, and told Ogg he hoped he could “bring it” because he was going to get the job.

“I go, ‘I got this thing,’ and we went in there and we literally threw down the scripts,” Luke said. “It was so good. The chemistry, it was just there, cooking and hot and heated.”

He said he told Ogg he’d see him on set because he knew they got the roles.

And he was right.

For the role, the developers used Luke and the other actors’ likenesses, and all of them did motion capture. He had to wear a motion-capture suit with reflective balls all over it.

“Everything you see Michael do is my face, voice, body and stunts,” he said. “It’s a regular acting gig.”

Popularity, conventions

Luke already knew the process and the ups and downs of auditions, and had gone broke a couple times. He said you can make unbelievable money and then nothing for a long time.

“It’s that perseverance,” he said. “It’s that thing. You learn it growing up in Danville.”

He said Danville has been considered the “red-headed stepchild to Champaign.” But his hometown also gave the world Dick and Jerry Van Dyke, Gene Hackman, Bobby Short, Donald O’Connor and other incredible actors and entertainers.

“I’m humbled to even be mentioned in the same breath as those guys,” Luke said. “They are some incredible people and success stories and talent. It’s just amazing to me.”

Luke even got to act with Dick Van Dyke in an episode of his series “Diagnosis Murder.”

“Working with Dick Van Dyke is one of the biggest thrills of my life,” Luke said.

He said he’ll never forget their scene. As they were about to start shooting, Van Dyke told him, “Let’s show them what Danville can do.”

“It’s something special,” Luke said.

When Luke performed in the Danville High production of “The Wizard of Oz,” in an auditorium that is was later named after Van Dyke, he’d never sung on stage before.

He’s now appeared in about 30 television shows and movies.

His convention appearances for fans revolve mostly around his video-game roles.

He said the actors were not allowed to participate in conventions for the first four years after the game came out. His first appearance and panel were at the New York Comic Con, “which was crazy,” he said. Then it was Stan Lee’s Comikaze Expo.

“I don’t think they were prepared for Steven and Shawn (Fonteno, who plays Franklin) and me to take off like we did,” Luke said, saying that conventions weren’t on their radar at the beginning.

Luke said he knew having them go to conventions would be good promotion for them and the game, which also has an online element that’s “self-feeding like a beast.”

Now with the game celebrating its 10th anniversary, Luke has been part of convention tours.

He’s been to China twice, he took his third trip to Brazil this year, and he’s also been to Dublin, London, Canada and all over the U.S.

“It’s really awesome,” Luke said. “The best part of it all is that no matter where we go, it’s exactly the same. You have people who just want to meet you. They’re shaking. They’ve played this game and lost themselves in this game.”

He said some fans have said the game and actors saved their life, or the game got them through hard times.

A fan who came to Pop Con in Indianapolis with his dad told Luke he loved his work in another Rockstar Games title, 2018’s “Red Dead Redemption 2.” He said he had contemplated suicide and that game and “GTA V” saved his life.

“This is the effect you can have on people,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.

“I will do as many comic cons,” he added. “It’s about the fans. You have to pay them back. If you don’t have the fans, you have nothing. I don’t have a career, or a different career.”

He said the impacts teachers and coaches have on their students and players and their lives, such as his brothers B.J. and Steve have had on athletes, as well as himself when he coached, are tremendous. His other siblings are brother Matt, who works in television/video, and sister Cricket, a social worker.

He said he tries to do about one convention a month.

“I try to give that back to my fans,” he said.

More recent jobs have been in Amsterdam, with Luke being a brand ambassador for a company that makes gaming computers.

“I shot a couple spots for that,” he said.

He also was on the Hulu show “Reasonable Doubt,” and had a role in the short film “Order for Ben” that should be making the indie film festival circuit, he said, where he plays the father of a transgender child.

“It’s a reconciliation film,” he said.

He said he gets cast in a lot of diverse roles and continues to audition. He said it’s busy in Atlanta.

“You just keep banging,” he said.

With his livestreaming, YouTube channel and social media, he’s built up quite the following. He has 2.8 million followers on TikTok. He said fans tell him, “We love you, ‘Big Daddy.’”

He also has his own merchandise.

“I like coaching actors,” he too said. “I’ve been doing some of that.

“It’s been really good for me. I’m able to go watch Bubba play baseball,” he added about being a dad, saying being a successful actor has allowed him to be there for his son, taking projects when he wants to.

Advice to others

What would he tell others who want to be an actor?

“You better be ready to work and study,” he said. “Everybody thinks it’s so glamorous. You can just get eaten alive. It’s kind of a ‘take’ business, not a ‘give’ business.”

He suggests prospective actors take theater classes in college and work hard on their acting or singing chops.

“The most important thing you can do is learn the business of that business,” he added. “If you don’t know how the business operates, you won’t know how to operate in that business.

“I was a hard-nosed, cocky brat and I went out there. I didn’t want to listen to anybody,” he added. “I didn’t take any (expletive) from anybody. I didn’t work the business.”

He said he didn’t want to “play the game” to be an actor.

“I wasn’t into it. I was never that guy,” he said.

Luke said as he got older and got more experience under his belt, he figured out how to play the game.

“I had a tremendous acting coach,” he said, who told him he had incredible talent but needed work on his humor, irony and charm.

Luke also advised those looking to act to find the humor in everything they do. Everything doesn’t have to be heavy, nor over-the-top funny.

“I believe that acting is reacting, acting is living, acting is listening and communicating,” he added. “You cannot give up if you really want to do it.

“If acting is that thing, then you better be ready to bust your butt,” he said.

He said he’s done many other jobs in his life to support his acting, including shoveling horse stalls, waiting tables, bartending and getting up at 5:30 a.m. to clean a theater to afford an acting class.

It’s not all red carpet and TMZ entertainment news, he said: “It’s a calling.”

 

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