If you’ve ever listened to a Black Library audiobook, or played a lot of Warhammer 40k games, you’ll know that it’s often hard to tell Space Marines apart based on just their voices. It’s something I’ve experienced frequently as an avid listener of 40k audiobooks—I stop paying attention for five seconds, and suddenly there are five Space Marines with almost identical names arguing with each other in similarly gruff voices.
We got to sit down with Black Library audio veteran Toby Longworth to talk about his voicework in Dawn of War 4, where he’s also voicing a bunch of Space Marines. Now, Longworth has played all stripes of Adeptus Astartes over the years, including Nathaniel Garro, Garviel Loken, Ezekyle Abbadon, plus a bunch of Primarchs, too, so he seemed like the perfect person to query about the challenges you face when voicing to the Emperor’s finest:
“The big problem with Space Marines, because of course, there’s a lot of cloning that goes on in the Space Marine world, as I’m sure you know, is getting them to sound different to each other,” explains Longworth. “They’re all pretty tough and flinty, so you’ve got to start with a tough flinty one. I think Garro was one of my earliest ones, but Garro I ended up doing slightly higher, because as you go through the book, you’ll find someone who goes:
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‘That is all very well, but you are only a first generation!’
‘I am a third generation!’
‘I’m BIGGER than you!’
‘I AM ENORMOUS AND WILL BE A DREADNOUGHT ONE DAY.’
“So you start getting more and more aggressively huge. Obviously if you’ve got more than ten Space Marines in a book, only dogs can hear you by the end of the- or that would be too high. Only ground squirrels can hear you.”
I suggest watching the clip above so you can enjoy Longworth’s delivery of the dreadnought line—I might genuinely make that my ringtone. We’ll also have some shorts of Toby Longworth delivering Space Marine lines from Dawn of War 4 in the next couple of days, which are genuinely a treat if you’re a fan of the original’s iconic unit barks, so keep your eyes peeled for those.
For more of our sit down and paint with Alex Jordan and Toby Longworth about Dawn of War 4 and all things 40k, be sure to check out our other shorts on the PC Gamer YouTube channel.