Troy Baker clarifies why he didn't join the Borderlands 3 cast

If you've been following the news surrounding Borderlands 3, you'll probably remember the back-and-forth between Gearbox's Randy Pitchford and iconic actor Troy Baker, who portrayed Rhys in Tales from the Borderlands.

Pitchford answered a question regarding the fact that Baker wouldn't be reprising his role as Rhys in Borderlands 3, despite Rhys being in the game on Twitter, stating "You'll have to ask Troy. I was told by the audio director that he turned it down. Fortunately, with how Rhys appears in the game, I don't think it actually matters at all. You'll see for yourself when the game comes out and you may disagree with me on that or not.".

When Troy was asked about this in a later interview with OnlySP (check the interview out right here), he cleared some facts up from Pitchford's Tweet.

"I didn't say I wasn't coming back. I said I would love to come back. They [Gearbox] said I'm not coming back. Their timeline tells an interesting story. I think it's interesting that Randy Pitchford tweeted out that I turned it down, and then he said he heard that I turned it down. So maybe, I would fact check before I tweeted out to the internet."

Now, some months and a Borderlands 3 release later, VG247 has sat down with the actor once again to get to the bottom of what happened between the two parties. In the interview, which you can read in its entirety here, Baker stated the following:

"So they came to me, and they were like, 'Do you want to do this? which I said, 'Absolutely.' And then they made it impossible for me to do the role. It had nothing to do with money, it had nothing to do with money. They just simply would not go about doing it the way that we needed it to be done. So then it was like, I never said no."

The reason for this, as explained by Baker later in the interview, was Gearbox's refusal to go union. "it was simply a matter of they wouldn't go union" he said before continuing, "And I can't do a non-union gig. And without getting too deep into the weeds of that, we had long conversations about this. We always knew going into it, that this was going to be the thing. They were going to take these characters, and put them from the Tales from the Borderlands series from Telltale, into Borderlands proper. I've been waiting for this call. They were like, 'Do you want to do this?' And I said, 'Yes'. They never, because they would never move from that position. I'm not mad. It's invariably a completely different character, but it still stings."