Jake Thomas may be best known to a generation of fans as Matt McGuire in the hit Disney seriesLizzie McGuire, but his latest role inMindsEyeis a far cry from Matt’s iconic shenanigans. As Marco Silva, a volatile tech mogul whose influence extends acrossMindsEye’s Redrock City, Thomas taps into something darker and more complex. Described as egotistical, brilliant, and emotionally detached, Silva is the type of character who sees people as numbers and reacts with fury when things fall out of line. It’s a role that pushed Thomas into intense territory, both vocally and emotionally, while also reflecting some unexpected personal parallels.
Game Rant recently spoke with Jake Thomas about his role as Marco Silva inMindsEyeand what players can expect from the character. During the interview, Thomas went into detail about his process for bringing Marco Silva to life, how the character resonates with him personally, and even went back in time 25 years to reflect on his role as Matt McGuire inLizzie McGuire.The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Creating MindsEye’s Marco Silva
Q: How did you approach bringingMindsEye’s Marco Silva to life?
A:My character of Marco Silva is probably just the worst qualities of me, just amplified. Marco is extremely egotistical. He’s basically just everything that is the worst part of atech billionaire inMindsEyethat you could imagine behind the scenes. He is absolutely that, by all means. He’s just angry most of the time. We had an ongoing joke that, throughout the entire project, Marco is either angry, injured, or a combination of the two.
Q: It sounds like it’s going to be a fun character then. What aspects of his personality or his backstory did you find most compelling or challenging to portray?
A:I think the most challenging part of portraying Marco Silva is understanding his motives because I think he has a clear view of what he wants for humanity, but the way that he goes about it is so detached from anything remotely human. He doesn’t understand people beyond what makes the most logical sense in his mind.
If someone is not following the order of the plan that he has orchestrated in his head, then they’re just in the way. He sees everything in ones and zeros, in a way. Everyone is just a digit that needs to fall in line with a code, and he gets very, very angry if things don’t go the way that he wants exactly.
Q: So is he pretty volatile in that anger?
A:Oh, he isextremely volatile in his anger. I actually had quite a few days in filming where I would go home and my voice would just be absolutely trashed because of how angry Marco is. He yells and he screams constantly, barking orders or just letting out all the rage that he has.
Q: How does he fit into the world of Redrock City, and what does his role entail in that?
A:Marco Silva fits into Redrock City really in an important way, because Redrock kind of revolves around him and Silva Corp. A lot of the vehicles that are in the world of Redrock are of Silva’s own design. The skycars are also something that he’s developed. The city’s robots are all something that Marco has created, and that’s something that he’s actually very, very proud of and holds near and dear to his heart.
There are some things that happen inMindsEye’s story that potentially jeopardize his control over thoseCity Bots, and he takes that very, very personally and seriously. I would say that even though he had no part in founding the city itself or in the city government, he is clearly a very important figure within the city, and a lot that happens in the city revolves around him.
Q: And without giving away any spoilers, what can you tell me about Marco’s personal journey through the game?
A:Without giving too much away, I would say Marco’s personal journey is that of him dealing with certain things that have come to light in his history, the decisions that he’s made to come to power, and how some of that may reflect poorly on him. But I think throughout the entirety of the story, he makes the decisions that he thinks are best for humanity. Whether that’s a good decision for an individual like the playercharacter inMindsEye, that’s yet to be seen.
He sounds very nuanced then.
A:He could be a good guy,he could be a bad guy, but at the end of the day, he thinks that he has made all the right decisions.
Q: Is there anything about Marco’s journey that resonates with you personally?
A:I think that his is a story of revelation, and I think I’ve definitely had a lot of revelation throughout my career as an actor. I did projects when I was a little kid,stuff likeLizzie McGuire. I definitely have gone through periods in my life where maybe I wanted to separate myself from those recognizable roles, and I wanted to be a more mature actor. But I think in recent years, I’ve definitely embraced that more. I think it’s really a privilege to be recognized for some of my early work, especially when people say how impactful it was for them as a really cherished childhood memory. I feel like that’s an absolute honor.
I think Marco also has to come to terms with some of the decisions that he’s made. There’s some stuff that happens inMindsEye’s storythat he tries to suppress, and he tries to keep separate from who he is today in the form of different working relationships that he’s had and how things developed and came to be that he takes a lot of credit for. Everything in the end kind of comes to light, and he has to really come to terms with the things that he did that made him who he is today. That’s a very vague way of saying some stuff without giving away any spoilers, but there’s some alignment there, for sure.
Q: What are you personally most excited for players to experience whenever they meet Marco Silva inMindsEye?
A:I think the thing I’m really excited for players to see is such a cinematic experience thatMindsEyeis going to be. The technology that we’re using on this is so high-end. It’s a step beyondmotion capture; it’s performance capture. All the nuances of the actors' facial movements are captured. This really is like playing a movie in a way, and our cast honestly reflects that too. We have a star-studded cast.
Alex Hernandez, who playsJacob Diaz, the player character, has been in stuff like Amazon’sThe Peripheral. Anjala Bhimani, who is super famous within the video game world for games likeApex LegendsandOverwatch. She’s also done stuff likeMs. Marvel. And then Dominic Burgess, who plays kind of my counterpart in the game, has been in stuff likePalm RoyaleandDahmerandSkeleton Crew. So, we’ve got a really talented cast that give fantastic performances and people are going to be able to see that in the game and in the cut scenes and in the dialogue, and I’m excited about that.
Q: Now, have you or are you going to play the game?
A:Oh, I am 100% going to be playing the game. On launch day, I’m going to be playing it on Twitch. I think we’ll probably be playing it for maybe a month. I don’t know how many times I’m going to play through the game within that month, but I’m so excited. You know, it’s technically not the first video game that I’ve been in. The first video game I was in was aPlayStation 2 gamecalledBrave: The Search for Spirit Dancer. It was kind of a limited-release title, and honestly, I didn’t play it until I was much older, but my experience with filming that game was just me and a voice-over booth giving like fifty different grunts, not knowing anything about what it was going to look like later on.
But with this, it’s so different because we’re in the scenes with the other actors, and it was just such a wonderful experience to play this out in real-time and be able to see on monitors on the sides of the stage early renderings of the environment and the characters and everything. It’s so different from everything else I’ve ever done, so I’m excited about that.
25 Years of Lizzie McGuire
Q: That’s actually a good segue into my next question. The 25th anniversary ofLizzie McGuireis coming up. How does it feel to be a part of a big project likeMindsEyeafter 25 years ofLizzie McGuire?
A:Man, I’m just so honored and thrilled to be a part ofMindsEye. It is such a massive project. It’s a AAA game, and it’s the first time I’ve been a part of a video game that’s this big. If you take it budget-wise, this is like being in anAvengersmoviein a way. This is a huge, huge project, so I’m super stoked and super excited to be a part of it.
Q: How do you feel Lizzie McGuire shaped you as an actor?
A:You know, I did a handful of projects beforeLizzie McGuire, but they were alldramatic roles in feature films. While those were somewhat long projects (becauseA.I.was like three months-ish andThe Cellwas probably about two or so), being onLizzie McGuirewas an every single weekday kind of process for filming. We shot an episode in 5 days, Monday through Friday, and we did that for 65 episodes over 2 years. It was very much a crash course in being really consistent as an actor.
I think it definitely trained me on how to memorize a script really quickly. Nowadays, when I’m trying to memorize a script, I can just do it like that. It comes like second nature to me now, and I think I have being onLizzie McGuireto thank for that. And then, beyond that, I think it trained me on how to hold myself on set. When you grow up on a film set, even though you’re a kid, you do have to have certain levels of being professional, and I definitely learned a lot of that.
There’s a little bit of a growing up fast kind of aspect to being on akids' showas a kid, where your job, even though you are a kid, impacts adults whose jobs depend on you doing your job correctly. There’s a little bit of pressure there, but it really shaped how to be a professional actor and who I am today.
Q: And how often did they let you ad lib? Were you big on that?
A:Oh man, as a kid, I would take every single opportunity to ad lib or add in jokes that they would give me. There were certain directors who liked to just stick to the script, and there wereother actors or other directorswho would just let me have free rein to be funny. Those are honestly the directors I liked working with so much because they were like kids on set.
And that’s something that I’ve tried to take into consideration with my directing because I now direct a lot for Nickelodeon, working with Kid Talent. I tried to take those aspects of like, what did those directors do that I enjoyed so much? And I put that into my directing too. But yeah, I adlibbed a ton.
So you’re naturally funny then, which I can tell just by talking to you.
A:I think the environment really helped me just accentuate that part of my personality because, really, that was the best job growing up as a kid. Oh, I get to go and do somecrazy stuntor have some crazy joke every day? That’s like the dream job for a kid.
Q: Do you still keep in touch with Hilary Duff?
A:You know, I see her every once in a while at the farmers' market on the weekends. Sometimes I run across her at the coffee shop. It’s kind of funny.
Q: And what is your favorite Lizzie McGuire episode?
A:Man, I’ve always said that my favoriteLizzy McGuireepisode is theKung Fuepisode where David Carradine teaches me how to do Kung Fu and I make a Kung Fu video. I think that’s a fantastic episode. Other than that, we had some awesome guest stars throughout the run. We had Aaron Carter, we had Frankie Muniz. We just had some really, really cool episodes.
Sometimes, I even forget the episodes that we did because when we were going to do the reboot, I went and rewatched all the original series, and some of the stuff I just forgot we even did. There are so many great episodes that are still so relevant today, which is so amazing. There are too many to count that I love, but the Kung Fu one has always stayed near and dear to my heart.
Q: Is there anything else that you want to add that’s personal or anything about eitherMindsEyeorLizzy McGuireor both?
A:Just that I’m super stoked forMindsEye. It’s unlike anything else that I’ve done before, just in the format of it, and I’m excited. Honestly, I would love to do more performance-capture games in the future. It’s kind of opened up a bit of a new world to me of possibilities. Even though my character is Marco Silva, they scanned me head-to-toe into the game, so it’s very much just me. Like all the freckles are in the right spots, but they aged me up just a little bit.
There are so many possibilities fordifferent charactersthat I can be with performance capture now. The same technology team that we had that was running our performance capture suits were the people who were working onAvatardown the street. And those characters are aliens! It’s just opened up a whole new world of possibilities that I would love to explore more.
Q: And you’re going to be playing it on Twitch on launch day.
A:Yes, I’m going to be playing it on Twitch launch day — twitch.tv/sirjakethomas. It’s going to be really fun, and I think I’m going to attempt to set up some giveaways for some codes too.
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