David Menkin is having a very good week.
“Every time I open my computer, nice things just sort of pop out at me,” he says. We’re speaking over a video call on a Tuesday, just a few days before his next big project will be released: Pragmata, Capcom’s long-in-development third-person shooter set on the moon. He’s been receiving congratulations from people who have played it pre-release and seen his name in the credits. Though reviews have already gone up, he’s still not allowed to tell anyone he’s starring in the game as it hasn’t yet been released at the time of our chat.
“I have gamers and streamers sending me messages and I’m able to sort of go, ‘Thank you,’ and send a little blue heart. But I can’t tell my brother or my sister,” Menkin says. “One of my nephews, he’s done that thing where he’s like, ‘So, you’ve been up to something?’ And I just shrug glacially.”
He recently had to go back into the booth to record some more lines for Pragmata trailers, which prompted an uneasy feeling. “I realized that I had to mourn it again,” Menkin says.
“Last year, end of the year, I sat on some stairs in London with a bunch of flowers that [Capcom had] given me to say thank you, and I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. You’re not allowed to talk about this stuff and you have to mourn it by yourself and nobody really understands,” Menkin says. “And it’s like, ‘It’s just a game.’ No, it’s not. This has been like a year and a half of my life.”
Menkin plays Hugh, an astronaut who ventures to a research base on the moon. His team winds up decimated and he’s quickly attacked by killer robots. With the childlike android Diana at his side — or rather, on his back — he has to investigate the robot threat and ensure it doesn’t reach Earth.
Menkin joined the cast of Pragmata in 2024. He recalled seeing it in the “Future of Gaming” PlayStation 5 reveal stream in June 2020, and then “completely forgotten about it.” And who can blame him? Pragmata was originally supposed to be released in 2022, and finally arrived on April 17, 2026.
“When I got the job, they brought us in to do something really nice, and very unusual in our industry, unfortunately, which is a table read,” he says. “I got to work with two of my fellow actors, one of them being Grace [Saif], who plays Diana. And that’s when we got the lore, not just of the game, but of the long history of the game.”
They read through some of the early cutscenes, like when Hugh names Diana and when they get to the 3D-printed New York Level, and were off to the races.
So much of Pragmata hinges on the relationship between Hugh and Diana. But Menkin and Saif were never actually together to build that relationship. “It would’ve caused a bit of a technical nightmare for [the development team],” Menkin says. The bulk of the game, like most games, was recorded with its actors in separate locales. “We’re used to it. This is the way this industry works.”
Menkin would record his lines, and then Saif would be able to work off his recordings when she stepped into the booth. Menkin notes he had to step away from recording Pragmata for a time, and when he returned, Saif was ahead of him. “So I made sure that I never caught up so that I could hear her amazing performance at all times.”
He likened the process to what it’s like for a film or TV actor to work across from a tennis ball standing in for a CGI character. “We have all these safety protocols in place to make sure that things stay real and that I’m given what I need in order to be able to imagine it correctly or imagine it well enough for it all to sort of come together,” Menkin says. He notes how the directors, writers, audio team, and more would join forces to make “the magic of games.”
“I have zero transferable skills. All I can do is act,” Menkin says. “Thank God there are all these people making sure I can feel safe enough to do my job and then at the end it all comes together and it works.”
Pragmata is a new IP and not part of any established franchise, like some of Menkin’s other roles, such as Malos in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 or Barnabus in Final Fantasy XVI. (When I ask if Menkin wondered if he was joining a Mega Man game back in 2024, he quips, “I am contractually unable to respond to this.”) That newness brings different challenges for the role.
“Which shoes should I put on? Hopefully they’re the right ones,” Menkin says. “I’ve never had an experience like this where I went in and I realized that I had to just accept who Hugh was and I had to sort of go all in on playing him and then I had to just leave it behind and hope.”
He compares that to the nervousness of recording lines as Luke Skywalker for Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. “Your heart’s coming out of your ass. You’re just panicking, but you’re also thrilled at the same time […] You hope that you’ll get this feeling again, either feeling.”
Menkin has always been a huge space and science fiction geek. “My entire career has been around the moon,” he says, and he’s not wrong. He played Neil Armstrong in a short film and portrayed the astronaut again in the audio drama Buzz opposite John Lithgow. “I’ve done all the famous quotes, Neil’s famous quotes,” Menkin says. “I know so much about the fucking moon.”
That passion for space, and the moon in particular, made it so Menkin was beside himself when the Artemis 2 mission took place the same month Pragmata was goong to be released. He wanted to post about it on his social media pages, but strict embargoes and contracts made it so he was wary of doing so.
“I didn’t want anyone from Capcom to be like, ‘Excuse me, is that a picture of the moon or is that a picture of our moon?’” he jokes.
Menkin describes himself as a “really bad liar,” meaning he had to “shut down, fully boot down” in order not to spill his secrets in the lead-up to the game’s launch. When the review embargo lifted Monday and people started chatting about Pragmata online, Menkin took the chance to sneak in a post. He put REM’s “Man on the Moon” over an image of Pragmata’s moon and shared it as a story. “I was like, ‘Just get it out of your system, go on,’” he says. Now that the game is out, though, he’s finally free.
“My job is so fucking weird,” Menkin muses.
