Actor James McCaffrey who had such a long career in live-action that people might not even realize he was an iconic video game voice actor (or vice versa), has died. TMZ, which first confirmed the news, says that he had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma and that he died on Sunday while “surrounded by friends and family.” McCaffrey was 65.
McCaffrey’s most iconic role came more than 20 years ago when he provided the voice of Max Payne, the ultimate hardboiled cop character, in his eponymous video game series from Remedy Entertainment (Payne’s face in the first two games, with his iconic scowl, was modeled after writer and future Remedy creative director Sam Lake). McCaffrey continued to do Payne’s voice, with an inhuman growl and a love for world-weary pontificating, in Max Payne’s two sequels, and he reunited with Remedy for 2019’s Control—this time providing a face and a voice to the mysterious Zachariah Trench. He also had a cameo in the Max Payne movie.
But just this year McCaffrey returned to the video game spotlight with a co-starring role in Remedy’s Alan Wake 2, paying off a vocal cameo in the first game by providing the voice of two different men named Alex Casey (one is a fictional hardboiled cop character in-universe who is obviously supposed to be Max Payne, the other is a real FBI agent who resents sharing a name and face with the fake detective, and both are present throughout the whole story and crucial the plot).
Lake, who provided Casey’s face in Alan Wake 2 (thereby maintaining a decades-long bond between the two of them), called McCaffrey a “brilliant actor” and said “no one could do what he did better than him” on social media.
In live-action, McCaffrey would be best recognized as Jimmy Keefe, the cousin of Denis Leary’s firefighter character on FX’s Rescue Me. Jimmy died on 9/11 before the events of the show and regularly appeared as a ghost throughout the series, usually to torment Leary’s Tommy Gavin and force him to learn some kind of lesson about being less of an asshole.
McCaffrey also appeared on Blue Bloods, Suits, Viper, New York Undercover, Jessica Jones, and Sex And The City. He is survived by his wife and daughter.