Ilkka Villi (born 4 August 1975 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish actor and writer. Having previously worked as a radio journalist, he has acted on stage, film, and television, and is best known for his role in Sorjonen, and abroad as the title role in Alan Wake. He's also done quite a bit of Finnish-language voice work, mostly audiobooks (he narrates the 2021 Finnish translation of the Dune novels, for instance), but also animation, especially Finnish dubs for Disney.
Fun fact: thanks to his family moving countries multiple times throughout his childhood, he's fluent in five languages and has acted professionally in all of them- his native Finnish, German (attended some elementary school in Vienna), English (grew up in the US and UK for a couple years on and off), Swedish (required subject in Finnish schools), and Spanish (exchange student during high school in Santiago).
Selected Film and Television Roles:
- Bright Falls (2010): Alan Wake
- War (Music Video) (2010): Alan Wake
- Imaginaerum (2012): Mr. White / Theodore Whitman
- Sorjonen (Bordertown) (2016-2020): Niko Uusitalo
- Invisible Heroes (2019): Ilkka Jaamala
Video Game Roles:
- Alan Wake (2010): Alan Wake and Mr. Scratch (Model, motion capture, and live-action footage), various supporting roles (motion capture)
- Alan Wake's American Nightmare (2012): Alan Wake and Mr. Scratch (Model, motion capture, and live-action footage)
- Quantum Break (2016): Alan Wake and Mr. Scratch (Live-action footage)
- Control (2020): Alan Wake (Model, motion capture, and live-action footage), Thomas Zane (Model, motion capture, and voice)
- Alan Wake II (2023): Alan Wake and Mr. Scratch (Model, motion capture, and live action footage), Thomas Zane (live-action footage and voice)
- Dead by Daylight (2024): Alan Wake (Model)
Finnish-Language Voice and Dub Work:
- The New Adventures of Lucky Luke (2012-2014): Lucky Luke
- Ninjago (2011-2019): Zane
- The LEGO Ninjago Movie (2017)
- Wreck-It Ralph (2013): Markowski
- Monsters University (2013): Johnny Worthington III
- Zootopia (2016): Nick Wilde
- Ultimate Spider-Man (2012) (2016, 2017): Purple Spider / Ben Reilly, Michael Morbius, Wolf Spider
- Cars 3 (2017): Mike Joyride
- Ferdinand (2017): Ferdinand
- Pokémon the Series: Sun & Moon (2017-2020): Professor Kukui, Dia, additional voices/sounds
- Moomin (1990) (2017): Snufkin, Joxter, additional voices
- Star Wars: Galaxy of Adventures (2019-2020): Obi-Wan Kenobi
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2020) (Season 7 only)
His works provide examples of:
- Acting for Two: An interesting example. The majority of his appearances as Alan Wake also have him play his doppelganger, yet in all of these cases both are voiced by a different actor, with one exception.
- The Cast Showoff: Villi is fluent in five languages and has acted professionally in every single one of them. In Sorjonen, his character usually takes the lead on speaking English as he's able to do it without much of an accent, and in Invisible Heroes, he plays a Finnish diplomat to Chile and speaks his native Finnish, plus Swedish, a little German, and a lot of Chilean Spanish, which just happens to be the dialect that he already speaks.
- Creator Backlash: In an official Remedy livestream, he said, very professionally and without naming any works, that there have been some low points in his career where he found himself thinking, "Well... if I never get to act again, at least I did Alan Wake."
- Ink-Suit Actor: For Alan Wake, naturally, due to its integration between game graphics and live action footage.
- Large Ham: He's often shown to have a rather calm personality offscreen, but his portrayal of Mr. Scratch was so over the top that Matthew Porretta, who provided the voice, admitted on more than one occasion that he was worried his own performance would "water it down".
- Same Language Dub: When the first Alan Wake game was in production during the mid/late 2000s, it was the industry norm to hire a local to perform mocap and serve as a character's likeness (assuming the character's appearance isn't completely fabricated and not based on a real person at all), and then hire someone else for the voice, which is why despite speaking fluent English with a pretty good American accent, Matthew Porretta has always performed the voice for Alan Wake while Villi is the likeness and performs the motion capture. He's mentioned working on his English accent over the years specifically to make himself easier to dub as Alan, to the point that by Alan Wake II, some players have found that his natural voice in English sounds so similar to Alan's that they're surprised to learn that he does not, in fact, do Alan's voice. When he reprised the role for 2019's Control, he received a character all his own that he portrays both in body and voice, although he and Porretta still share Alan, which they see as a collaboration- as Alan, Villi delivers Alan's dialogue in his own voice while performing the motion-capture, which Porretta uses as reference for his own vocal performance, and then Villi performs the facial capture and lipsyncs to Porretta's recordings, leading to both actors being influenced by each other's performances at multiple points.
- Tall, Dark, and Handsome: He's about 6'2", and the lower camera angle in Alan Wake II (combined with him towering over most other characters that aren't also played by himself) definitely emphasizes his height. Writer-Director of the Alan Wake series Sam Lake said that when he was casting for Alan, he was drawn to Villi immediately thanks to his expressive blue eyes and his handsome looks, and Alan Wake II character artist John Crossland described him in a Reddit AMA
as "the most handsome man in Finland", and gave particular attention to his "amazing" dark, wavy hair and his "fantastic, luscious beard"; according to Villi, the beard that Alan sports in II is only three weeks' growth for him.
