Mafia 3 and MindsEye Star on Racism in the First and the Failure of the Second

In an interview with VideoGamer.com, Alex Hernandez spoke about his leading role in Mafia 3, a role he’d return to in a heartbeat. He also shared his thoughts on the game’s depiction of racism and the fight against it.

The second they called me I would get back in the mocap suit. Playing Lincoln has been one of the top-three experiences in my career. I love storytelling, the writer Bill Harms… the nuance with which Bill wrote the emotionality of a man who was so hard, they allowed moments to let him crack.

Part of what was beautiful about Mafia 3 was laying bare a lot of the racial inequality that exists in the United States. Existed then and still exists now. To get to shoot a scene where there was a layer of global that then turned really personal, the global racial inequity that existed between whites and blacks at the time being channeled via a very direct one-to-one relationship with someone that Lincoln thought was his brother despite all of that.

And, so, it’s sort of like getting to express a very unique heartbreak of a human outrage in a game that was about guns, and death, and stabbing, and curb-stomping. It’s a very different gameplay experience form those minor moments. I get to f***ing string some dude up on a Ferris Wheel. I lynch a dude, I dump a dude in gasoline and set him on fire.

The amount of black and brown people who’ve reached out to me since Mafia to be like, “Bro, I cannot tell you how good it felt to lynch a white politician”. That’s real. That’s like a global… it’s an expeirence that many white people will never have to have a low-grade, humming, constant ache and pain in your body all the f***ing time. Every time you leave your house, unless you live in some community where you’re actually the homogeneity there. Other than that, it’s just like, to live in the United States is to constantly be reminded that you’re not in a certain race or class.

Previously, the actor had commented on MindsEye, in which he also played the protagonist, criticizing its poor quality (technical issues, reviews). As a gamer, he said he was frustrated by the many bugs, but still enjoyed working on the project: great relationships with colleagues and the team, opportunities for input and revisions, etc.

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