Actors! They’re just like us. Especially when they’re Henry Cavill, who, when he’s busy not playing Superman or not playing Geralt of Rivia any more, is now dedicating his free time to perhaps the least surprising thing possible for Henry Cavill to be doing: playing the new Warhammer game.
Perhaps we could’ve all just silently accepted that somewhere out there Cavill, noted 40K fan, was probably in all likelihood playing Saber Interactive’s new shooter Space Marine 2, given, well, that he’s Henry Cavill and it just seemed incredibly likely. But thankfully the actor decided to confirm that he is indeed sinking a lot of time into shooting and/or chainsword-ing Tyranids into piles of red goop.
“I couldn’t complete the campaign on Angel of Death by myself (or at least didn’t have patience to complete by myself!) which I love!,” Cavill said in a new post to his Instagram, after previously describing Space Marine 2 as “the mutt’s” (put it on the back of the box). Attached was an image of Cavill’s PC moniter—note the tastefully displayed copy of the second Horus Heresy supplement rulebook, Massacre, which Cavill’s headphones rest on to the side, just for an added touch—as he prepared to load into a round of multiplayer. Cavill smartly edited to replace his username simply with “Nope,” so you’ll never know if you just so happen to be purging the heretic, or being the heretic getting purged, alongside Hollywood’s biggest Warhammer nerd. Take it as a sign to be nice to all of your team mates, even in the grim darkness of the far future, because you never know which one of them might be Henry Cavill.
It’s perhaps time best spent, considering that we know Cavill is, in some capacity, still attached to Games Workshop and Amazon’s plans for a Warhammer 40K TV series. Although the two company’s deal over the Warhammer license is set to expire by the end of 2024 if a creative direction on the series isn’t in place by then, the recent announcement that the two teamed up to work on an episode of Prime Video’s new gaming anthology series Secret Level for a Space Marine 2 story seems to indicate that all is well in Amazon and GW’s vision of Warhammer-dom. So I guess this just counts as research and prep work, as if someone like Cavill actually still needs to do that at this point.
In the meantime, we are simply left to wonder: does Henry Cavill have anything to say about Space Marine 2 and Warhammer‘s ineffective commentary on the franchise’s satirical intents on portraying a fascist empire in decline, or is he just kind of miffed that you can’t play as the Adeptus Custodes in multiplayer?
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