Troy Baker Says Fullmetal Alchemist Laugh Led to Early Greed Recasting

Before he became widely associated with video-game performances including Joel Miller in The Last of Us and Joker in Batman: Arkham Origins, Troy Baker says he ran into a very specific limit in an anime recording booth: a script direction calling for 30 seconds of escalating maniacal laughter.

Baker recalled being cast as Greed for the first adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist. The character’s very first cue, he said during an appearance on Party Chat, was the extended laugh. It was not merely a quick villain cackle at the end of a line. The performance needed to build for roughly half a minute, meaning it had to retain a sense of character, increase in intensity, and remain usable as recorded dialogue.

By Baker’s account, the session did not work out. He said the production spent around 15 to 20 minutes attempting the one cue, but he disliked the result each time. He compared the sound he was producing to air escaping from a balloon. The director eventually asked him to leave the booth, and Baker describes himself as having been fired from the role. Chris Patton ultimately voiced Greed in that earlier Fullmetal Alchemist series.

A small direction with a big demand

“Maniacal laughter” can look like a simple instruction on a page, but Baker’s story is a useful illustration of why short pieces of nonverbal voice work can be unusually difficult. Dialogue gives a performer words, rhythm, intent and a sequence of thoughts to play. A sustained laugh has none of those supports in the usual sense. It still needs emotional progression, however, especially when a script asks for it to build.

In practical terms, a building laugh asks an actor to control several things simultaneously:

Duration: The sound must last as long as the scene requires without seeming to stop, restart or run out of energy.
Escalation: It needs an audible shift from its opening point to its peak; otherwise “building” becomes a static noise.
Character: The laugh should communicate something about the person making it, rather than functioning as a generic villain effect.
Vocal control: Breath, volume and texture need managing closely enough that the take remains clear and consistent.

That combination can make a seemingly tiny cue more exposed than an ordinary line. There is no dialogue to redirect attention and no semantic meaning to lean on. Every crack in the performance is audible. Baker’s candid retelling does not turn the experience into a technical postmortem, but it makes the central point clear: his attempt at the laugh was not delivering what the role required at that time.

It is also a reminder that casting is not a permanent verdict on an actor’s range. A role may hinge on one demand that does not suit a performer, even when that performer is capable of excelling in other kinds of work. Baker framed the setback as discovering something he could not do then: laugh in the particular way the scene demanded.

The irony of Baker’s later Joker work

The anecdote has an obvious punchline because Baker later played Joker in Batman: Arkham Origins, a character synonymous with distinctive, often unsettling laughter. Baker himself noted the irony of later auditioning for “another certain character” known for laughing.

That does not mean the two situations were identical, or that one later role somehow erases the earlier problem. A character’s laugh can be written and directed in many ways. Its length, pacing, emotion and place within a scene all matter. A brief laugh attached to dialogue is a different acting problem from a standalone 30-second escalation that opens a session. The point is not that laughter became easy in some universal sense; it is that voice acting depends heavily on the exact task, the character and the direction.

For game audiences, Baker’s account also provides a more grounded view of a career that can appear seamless in retrospect. High-profile credits can obscure the routine reality of auditioning, rejections, recasting and roles that simply do not fit on a given day. The story is notable precisely because it comes from a performer whose later work includes characters that demand intensity, menace and emotional precision.

Those different performance requirements are worth separating. Voice acting is not just changing one’s pitch or producing an unusual sound. It involves delivering a performance that fits a director’s interpretation, the timing of the production, the character design and the demands of the scene. Baker’s Greed audition experience, as he describes it, was a case where a particular nonverbal performance became decisive.

Greed, recasting and a return in Brotherhood

Baker did get another opportunity to play Greed when Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood arrived. The later series is a remake that includes the manga’s full ending, while the 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist remains highly regarded in its own right. Baker returned as Greed for Brotherhood, creating a rare second chance at the same character after being replaced in the earlier adaptation.

His first question upon coming back was straightforward: did Greed have to laugh? Baker said the answer was no—there would be no maniacal laughter this time.

That detail is funny, but it also underlines how much a single script choice can shape a recording session. The role itself had not become unrecognizable; rather, the specific obstacle Baker had encountered was absent. The later casting gave him room to approach Greed without immediately confronting the cue that had derailed the earlier booking.

For viewers, the two adaptations are distinct works rather than interchangeable versions of the same recording. The earlier series and Brotherhood have different relationships to the underlying manga’s conclusion, and their casts and performances are part of what separates their identities. Baker’s experience sits right at that intersection of adaptation history and performance: one character, two productions, and sharply different outcomes for one actor.

Why this matters beyond one memorable blooper

It would be easy to reduce the story to a celebrity voice actor failing at a laugh before going on to play Joker. Baker tells it with enough self-deprecation to make that reading understandable. But the more useful takeaway is that creative work is often judged in exact, narrow moments. A performer can be prepared, talented and well cast overall, then be blocked by one requirement that is unusually hard to execute convincingly.

The recording booth can make that pressure more immediate. Unlike a broad stage performance, vocal recording puts the microphone close to every choice. A laugh that feels energetic in the room may sound thin, strained or artificial on playback. And when a scene calls for a sustained progression, simply repeating the same vocal gesture is unlikely to satisfy the direction. Baker’s description of repeated attempts over 15 to 20 minutes captures how quickly a single cue can become the whole session.

There is a practical lesson here for audiences too. Credits rarely show the roads not taken: the roles lost because of a troublesome scene, the iterations abandoned in the booth, or the later productions that provide a better fit. Baker’s return in Brotherhood is a neat counterpoint to the original disappointment, not because it reframes the earlier recasting as meaningless, but because it shows that one failed requirement did not close the door permanently.

It is especially fitting for Greed, a character whose name suggests appetite and desire, that the role itself became a career detour Baker eventually revisited. The first attempt ended over a demand for a carefully controlled vocal crescendo. The second came with a simpler answer: no laugh required.

Anime and games frequently share performers and audiences, even when their production processes differ. Baker’s story is a compact example of the craft behind that overlap: performance is not measured by a résumé alone, and iconic later roles do not mean every prior audition or session went smoothly. Sometimes the most durable professional anecdote begins with an instruction that sounds trivial on paper and proves anything but trivial once the microphone is live.

For more entertainment casting discussion, read about Jacksepticeye’s stated goal of honoring Bloodborne’s world.