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Conor McGregor picked up and flipped a Call of Duty dev during the making of Infinite Warfare: 'I wanted him to do something really physical, to demonstrate how capable he is'
The MMA fighter and failed Irish presidential candidate had a small role in the 2016 shooter.
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Call of Duty doesn't have much luck with its stunt casting. Two years after Infinity Ward put Kevin Spacey in Advanced Warfare—before he was accused of sexual assault—it turned MMA fighter Conor McGregor into a future soldier, Captain Bradley Fillion, in Infinite Warfare.
McGregor's role was quite small, despite being one of the game's antagonists, and ended in his character's demise, but co-directors Jordan Hirsh and Taylor Kurosaki didn't want to cut any corners when it came to the mo-cap.
I got to work with Conor McGregor, and the story about Conor McGregor… We shot that in either 2015 or early 2016, but this is the height of him as a UFC fighter. And so of course I wanted him to do something really physical, to demonstrate how capable he is. He's shorter than me, but I was trying to explain to him the choreography that I wanted him to do at the beginning there, where he smashes the guy, and he grabbed me and flipped me onto the ground—very gently. And then did this punch [right in front of my face] that I could feel the wind from.
At the time, co-directors Hirsh and Kurosaki were trying to shake things up in regards to mo-cap. "I think that the folks at Infinity Ward probably thought I was a little crazy when I came in," Kurosaki tells us. "I think for every game they had done before that, you would maybe do some mocap or a cool takedown or a finisher, and then you'd have actors that would come into a VO booth and you'd have them come in one at a time and they'd read their lines and it’d be stitched together and then you're done. And they built a performance capture stage specifically for this project."
With Infinite Warfare, the team was doing full performance capture, so it needed its actors to get more physical.
Kurosaki remembers, after McGregor flipped him, that he "did this punch [right in front of my face] that I could feel the wind from. We're just rehearsing and figuring out the blocking. Everyone on the stage was, ‘Whoa, that was crazy! It was so fast!’ And of course, I had a different perspective than everyone else. Then everyone was laughing, and he helped me up, and I'm laughing. And then all of a sudden, this giant bead of sweat starts running down my face. I had this adrenaline, even though I knew I was perfectly safe. My body was just doing something that I couldn't control."
A few years later, McGregor started racking up criminal charges for assault. In 2019, he attacked a man for not accepting a drink in a Dublin pub. He pleaded guilty. In the same year, police in Ireland started investigating McGregor over allegations of multiple sexual assaults. He was not prosecuted, but a civil claim was made against him by Nikita Hand. In 2024, an Irish jury found that McGregor raped Hand.
Also in 2024, McGregor starred in Hitman, as one of its celebrity Elusive Targets—his second videogame role outside of the UFC games. IO Interactive stopped working with him after the ruling and removed him from the game as an Elusive Target.