Mafia 3 lead would play Lincoln Clay again “in a heartbeat” as playing the character was one of the best experiences of their life

It’s been nine years since the release of Mafia 3, and the game’s overall reception in the eyes of fans has increased massively. While the game launched with major technical issues and a great deal of open-world padding, fans have since fallen in love with the game’s story and characters.

With Mafia: The Old Country set to release in just two weeks, the actor behind the third game’s protagonist Lincoln Clay revealed that he would love to “get back in the mocap suit” and revise his role sometime in the future. While returning for The Old Country wouldn’t make sense, he hopes he can come back sometime in the future.

Lincoln Clay actor wants to return to Mafia

Speaking on an upcoming episode of the VideoGamer Podcast, Lincoln Clay actor Alex Hernandez said he would return to the role of Lincoln Clay “in a heartbeat”. Despite the long hours in incredibly “itchy” mocap suits, Hernandez loved playing the role and would love to return even for a cameo.

“The second they called me I would get back in the mocap suit,” Hernandez said. “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.”

At its heart, Mafia 3 is a revenge story, and Hernandez fell in love with the conflict between Lincoln Clay and Giorgi Marcano and how he was given the change to portray a “moment of vulnerability” for “such a dog of a character, a one-minded, badass, testosterone-filled dude”.

On the other side, there was also the politics of the situation. Set in the late 60s, Mafia 3 boldly took the state of racial inequality of the time and worked it into both its story and gameplay, and Lincoln’s betrayal within this setting really hit home.

“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.” Hernandez said. “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 channelled 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.”

“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.”

MAFIA 3 ACTOR ALEX HERNANDEZ

Hernandez explains that these moments of controlling Lincoln Clay and committing heinous acts of brutality that were commonplace against black citizens in the 1960s was cathartic. The actor explained that being given the chance to do this satisfied a “shadow self” in a way that no other games have ever accomplished.

“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.”

Lincoln Clay’s canonical ending still hasn’t been decided by developer Hanger 13, although there are multiple paths forward. While there is an ending where the character dies, there’s definitely space for the character to continue.

Right now, the series is going back to the past with Mafia set in the early 1900s, decades before Lincoln Clay was born. Perhaps, one day, we’ll get a game that jumps past the late-60s and gives the character another lease on life.