I got the audition sides. Smuggler. Fast-talker. Runs a tailoring shop as a front. Chip on his shoulder. Doesn’t suffer fools. Holds grudges.
Okay. I know this guy. That’s my default New York — blame a few years of D&D campaigns and some method I picked up somewhere along the way. Sorry, New Yorkers. I come in peace.
Then I read the full character brief.
—
Needles — real name Pyotr Portnoy — used to run jobs with Gia. They were colleagues. Rivals. Close. Closer than that, actually. Then something went south. The kind of wrong where everyone walks away paying for it in their own way. The details are for you to find in the game.
What matters is this: he owes her a favor. He hasn’t forgiven her for it.
And now she’s walked back through his door to collect.
—
That’s when the scene stopped being about a smuggler and started being about something I recognized.
You know that feeling when an ex texts you out of nowhere? You weren’t expecting it. You weren’t thinking about them. You’d done a pretty solid job convincing yourself you were fine. And then your phone lights up and suddenly there’s this rush of blood to your head — so fast you can hear it passing by your ears. It’s deafening. You go cold. Your body doesn’t know how to feel because it’s trying to process ten things at once: the history, the hurt, the good stuff you buried, the anger you thought you’d dealt with.
That’s Needles in this scene. His past just walked through the front door. Not just Gia — everything she represents. The grief. The anger. The “what if.” The version of himself that existed before all of it.
That’s overwhelming. That’s the scene.
Context. Opinion. Intention. The rest was just living in his shoes.
I went a little extra on the audition — longer pauses, a few adlibs, let the scene breathe more than is strictly safe to do when you’re trying to book the job. It’s a risk. But it felt right to let the moment play out the way I saw it.
It paid off.
—
Here’s where it gets interesting.
There’s a line in the game — the final line of the release trailer — that I thought I had figured out.
*”Remember. Act like a bloodthirsty sadist who wrecks everything around you. Basically, just be Eight-Shot.”*
My first read on it was comedic. Needles being Needles — cocksure, quick with it, a little sharp. Something like: *”Hey, quick note: wreck everything. So, you know. Tuesday for you.”*
That’s a valid read. It’s fun. It works.
But Duane and Tyler — the Creative Director and Narrative Director on my sessions — took it somewhere more interesting.
Eight-Shot isn’t some nickname Gia picked out to sound cool. It’s a name she earned. A name from before — from the version of her that existed when she and Needles were running together. When everything was still in front of them.
With that context, the line changes completely. Needles isn’t teasing her. He’s reminding her that some people don’t forget.
That’s not a joke. That’s a dig. That’s his resentment and his pain, dressed up in the cadence of a throwaway line.
—
There’s another line — earlier in the scene — that I keep coming back to.
Gia says: *”We haven’t talked since that day. I still think about it.”*
Needles responds: *”Funny. I try not to.”*
He’s running. He’s been running since that job went wrong, and blaming Gia is easier than facing what he actually feels. That’s not something I judged him for. That’s something I understood.
One of the things I love most about this work is that we don’t get to play paragons. Needles is flawed. His resentment toward Gia probably isn’t entirely fair — deep down, he knows that. But fair isn’t the point. The point is that it hurts less to be angry at her than to sit with the truth.
I played into that. All of it.
—
The thing about this job is that I get to take on these characters like putting on a suit jacket. The writers and directors have a vision of how that suit jacket should fit. They hand it to you and you try it on. Ideally, it fits better than anyone expected. But your job is to learn how the suit fits and wear it that way. You’re the one wearing it.
Needles fit well.
—
Pick up Aether & Iron on Steam. Right now. And tell Needles I said hello.