God of War Laufey Planned Since 2018, Reveals Star Deborah Ann Woll

God of War Laufey, featuring Kratos’ wife Faye as its protagonist, may have come as a surprise to some, but not to its star, Deborah Ann Woll, who first heard about the project almost a decade ago.

“Oh my God, I can’t tell you. I still pinch myself. I’ve known about this for nearly ten years, and I haven’t been able to talk about it,” revealed Woll in an interview with CGM.

The Daredevil actor went on to say that the director of God of War’s 2018 reboot, Cory Barlog, not only told her about this plan way back around the time of that game’s release, but also knew that it would feature one of her sidekicks featured in the reveal trailer: Jack Quaid’s talking Cube.

“He pitched it to me in 2018, and they had known about it before then,” Woll said. “It’s wild. Like when Cory brought me in to talk about doing Ragnarök and show me the 2018 game, he already had a poster for the Laufeygame with me and a cube. A cube that’s been there since the beginning. It’s deeply a part of the lore.”

The upcoming entry into the Santa Monica Studio series certainly provoked a reaction online, not least thanks to the appearance of this gelatinous cube companion. But its director, Ariel Lawrence, has tried to ease concerns, as she said that she “understands” skepticism following the reveal, but hopes fans will give it a chance.

Of course, some were also disappointed to see Kratos be replaced as the lead character for this God of War chapter, but a new perspective is something Woll is seemingly eager to bring to the mythology. “We need as much diversity as possible within these stories so that we can tell even more stories,” Woll said to CGM. “This is all just about enjoying each other’s perspectives and widening our experiences. If I get to, in some small part, do that for women within gaming, I’m very excited about that.”

“It’s this expansion of mythology, this expansion of story,” she adds. “This is, we now know we’re allowed to say, going to run concurrently to 2018. And so all of the mysteries and the little hints and clues, the questions, the lingering, you know, ideas that you have from that Norse saga, we’re going to answer a lot of that, or we’re going to expand upon it. So this is going to feel like you are getting more story. This is going to continue to deepen what we’ve already learned.”

Woll appears to be only expressing excitement for the project, and appears to have loved every step of the process of becoming Laufey. “I’m willing to say my favourite job I’ve ever had,” she continued. “When I first saw that trailer, my jaw hit the ground. “It’s the first time I’ve been able to experience my work as a viewer without judgment, without self-consciousness, because I knew how much work went into it after me, and that I can just appreciate that, like the technology, but also the animators; they caught every little muscle movement that my face can make.”

“Kratos is so stoic. I was like, maybe the technology can’t capture little movement, you know, because he doesn’t make a lot of facial movement,” Woll says. “But it’s also just because that’s the character. So it wasn’t sort of utilizing that. So when I watched this one back, I was like, “Oh my God, every single little muscle movement, my eyes, little tiny things that they captured and put in that make a fuller, richer person,” and I couldn’t, I really was blown away.”

We still don’t know when we’ll be playing God of War Laufey, but fear not, Kratos fans, there will be more games featuring everyone’s favourite angry Greek god, with Barlog saying that there are “many more stories to tell.” For more on Laufey, you can read about why I think this latest God of War is taking the sort of risks I’d like to see more PlayStation series gamble on.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.