Cody Christian, the voice behind Cloud Strife in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Remake, has said the character’s most-memed and infamous line was “drilled” into his brain for three months.
Cloud begins in much the same way as other old-school JRPG protagonists. He’s initially edgy, moody, brooding, quiet, too cool to care about the planet. And this stoic exterior is summed up in the character’s most infamous line from the original game: “Not interested.”
For such a seemingly throwaway line, “not interested” has had surprising staying power in the fandom. The line has been memed across the community and referenced in everything from Super Smash Bros, Kingdom Hearts, Dissidia, and almost every other game Cloud’s made an appearance in. But Christian now explains that it also helped him find the character’s voice, too.
“I have an anchor line, if you will, that was so drilled into me [for] the first, like, three months of doing this game,” the actor explains in Square Enix’s Inside Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth series. “If I’m ever questioning the tone or where I need to be with it, I always go to that line because it’s there,” he says, pointing to his brain.
As well as being a fun meme and a good summary of the character’s moody tendencies, Christian thinks the line reveals so much more about Cloud than one might expect at first glance. “There’s an exterior to Cloud and that’s what most people see initially,” he says. “That’s that tough, abrasive, cold, almost disheartened, exterior shell.” But over the course of Rebirth, Christian says that players can see that Cloud is actually a “little boy who has just been hardened with circumstances in life.”
“In the first game, we kinda got introduced to Cloud that way, and slowly, as the progressed, we got to peel away the layers. We got to see what was inside,” he continues. “In the second game, we get to really see the core. The emotional depth. The vulnerability. The likeability. The goofball-esque.” All that hides behind a cool “not interested.”
Elsewhere, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s Vincent didn’t know he was voicing the fan-favorite anti-hero until he was in the recording booth.
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