How “Resident Evil Requiem” star Nick Apostolides brought Leon S. Kennedy into 'uncharted territory' (exclusive)

Nick RomanoFri, February 27, 2026 at 3:00 PM UTC

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Nick Apostolides returns as Leon S. Kennedy in 'Resident Evil Requiem'Credit: Ivan Weiss; CapcomKey Points -

Resident Evil Requiem star Nick Apostolides gives his first interview about returning as Leon S. Kennedy for the ninth video game in the series.

Apostolides shares the mood board he created in preparation for this more haggard Leon, along with the graphite sketch of an injured lion he used to define his essence.

The actor describes the "weight" of bringing Leon back to Raccoon City.

For the past 20 years, Nick Apostolides, Capcom’s current Leon S. Kennedy of the Resident Evil games, maintained a tradition with his brother. It started at their home in Boston when his sibling was 9 and he was 21. Baby bro was already well versed in Super Mario Bros. and Apostolides "thought he was ready to enter adulthood."

"I said, ‘Do you wanna play a big boy game?’” the actor recalls. That happened to be Resident Evil 4, the survival-horror franchise’s 2005 entry that heavily involved Mr. Kennedy, a government agent on a mission to rescue the U.S. president’s kidnapped daughter from a dangerous cult, while fighting through zombie hordes. In other words, a massive leap forward in maturity from that lovable Italian plumber in overalls.

"It started his love affair ever since then," Apostolides says, and now they make a habit of playing each new Resident Evil game together for the very first time. When the actor, 41, speaks with Entertainment Weekly, it's the eve of Capcom announcing his return as the fan-favorite Leon in Resident Evil Requiem (out now on consoles) and he already has plans to fly to Boston a few days later to keep the brotherly ritual going.

This stranger-than-fiction parallel between the gaming series that started their tradition and his current acting gig are not lost on Apostolides. He first played Leon in the remakes of Resident Evil 2 (2019) and 4 (2023), as well as a Netflix CG-animated miniseries (2021) before his Requiem comeback.

Leon S. Kennedy in 'Resident Evil Requiem'Credit: Capcom

“I've been in a surreal state for about a decade,” Apostolides tells EW, sipping coffee on his living room couch in Los Angeles on an early Wednesday morning in February. “That game and the performance of the original voice actor for Leon inspired me to act in the first place. I remember daydreaming with my little brother, ‘Wouldn't it be cool to do this one day, be a voice in these games?’ I didn't even correlate it to acting. I wasn't even an actor at that point, never thought about it as a career path. Now fast forward about 20-something years later and it's a reality. Can I swear? … It's a mindf---! It's not often that an actor gets to act in their favorite franchise.”

Apostolides describes stepping back into the role for Requiem as “a different kind of pressure.” When he first landed the role for the remakes years prior, there was the weight of living up to the standards set by Paul Haddad, the voice of Leon in 1998’s Resident Evil 2, and Paul Mercier, the Leon of the original Resident Evil 4. Requiem, however, is the first time Apostolides delivers a Leon performance in a game that’s not retelling the events of a past entry.

“It was all uncharted territory,” he agrees. “I had to really trust the direction of Capcom and really trust my instincts that I knew the character, I knew what to do.”

With the game’s release looming in the very near future, he admits, “I'd be lying if I said I didn't have any butterflies.”

Nick Apostolides at the 2025 Pixel Pack photo shoot, in partnership with Entertainment WeeklyCredit: Rich Soublet

Resident Evil Requiem is set approximately 30 years after Raccoon City was destroyed during the events of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999). The new story unfolds through two dueling perspectives. FBI intelligence analyst Grace Ashcroft (Industry actress Angela Sant’Albano) is assigned to investigate a dead body at an abandoned Midwest hotel, the same location where her own mother was murdered eight years prior. When a local police officer then goes missing at the same hotel, veteran agent Leon S. Kennedy joins the fray.

Requiem will also return to the blast-scarred remains of Raccoon City, the fictionalized setting that started it all with a zombie outbreak that reshaped the world. Apostolides felt the weight of that alone, calling the moment "huge" for the franchise. If the first half of the game heavily features Grace-centric sequences, the second half gives the same for Leon.

"It wasn't until Leon got to Raccoon City where I really got to hone in on those instincts," the actor says. "The gravity of everything that he was witnessing, that's the core of his PTSD throughout the canon of the entire character.... When he re revisits Raccoon City, it's like a blast from his past, no pun intended."

Apostolides officially got the call about Requiem in November 2023, but fans figured out his casting a few months later. In February 2024, the actor posted a photo of himself holding a hatchet with pink tape wrapped around the hilt, suggesting some kind of motion-capture gig. His caption mentioned he had "a really good day in my life.” Earlier this year, once Capcom revealed the character of Leon was back, that photo went viral after internet sleuths dug it up.

“I almost got in trouble for that,” Apostolides comments. “I had archived that post on Instagram months and months ago, and I thought I hid it from the internet. I forgot that I had posted it to X as well a long time ago. I just forgot about it.”

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Leon Kennedy fights an infected in 'Resident Evil Requiem'Credit: Capcom

While Requiem can accommodate player preferences, it's designed to offer two different experiences based on the character POV. As Grace, a pop-up screen suggests keeping the camera in a first-person perspective to enhance the horror elements, including tension and jump scares. As Leon, however, it's recommended to play in the third person, which couples nicely with the action-thriller vibe of that storyline.

One of the early Grace sequences sees her sneaking through the mysterious Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center with nothing but throwable glass bottles as her defense against a chilling entity. The next level then shifts to Leon, who picks up a chainsaw to cut his way through an onslaught of infected. "Nice," he utters before picking up the machinery.

It allowed for Apostolides to embrace an even more world-weary version of Leon that fans of the long-running franchise haven't seen before. He's much older than the more lithe detective we've come to know, and though the specifics are a spoiler, we know he's infected with...something that keeps a ticking clock looming over his head at all times.

Typically when preparing for a role, Apostolides, as a guitarist, picks a song that encapsulates a character's essence. With Leon in Requiem, he chose "Orion" by Metallica, but he also embraced a side of his artistic self that he rarely shares with others. He began with a mood board of different words, objects, and photography.

"Reaper," "hemorrhage," "violent ember," and "fire in the dark" were some of the verbiage he chose, while the art collage consisted of dark images of a Grim Reaper, a shadow figure emerging from water, a lone deer on a mist-shrouded path beneath a skeletal tree, and a black-and-white snapshot of a crumbled medieval knight pummeled by arrows.

Nick Apostolides' graphite sketch of an injured lion; Leon S. Kennedy in 'Resident Evil Requiem'Credit: Nick Apostolides; Capcom

"The one image that I assigned to [Leon's] essence was an injured lion," Apostolides shares later on through an email correspondence. He calls this beast Lion S. Kennedy. "Crude, experienced, powerful, dangerous. And the phrase I locked onto was that he had to be 'brutal out of necessity,'" he continues. "The stakes were higher, and he needed every fight to end as quickly as possible this time around."

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Apostolides envisioned this scarred lion through photo-real graphite sketching. Apostolides started drawing around the age of 3, making it his longest-running hobby. He still dabbles in various mediums, but graphite sketches are his most involved. The lion alone took him about 30 hours to produce. "Animals are brutal; they're highly textured and I'm slow :)," he writes over email.

This creative process of mapping the mind of Leon signifies how Apostolides has changed alongside the character over the years. Back on the Resident Evil 2 remake, Capcom wouldn't let him lean into what he describes as "the cowboy version" of the gunslinger he had in mind, not until Resident Evil 4. Now with Requiem, Capcom emphasized a more cinematic approach, letting the cut scenes "breathe," as Apostolides puts it.

Nick Apostolides for the 2025 Pixel Pack photo shoot, in partnership with Entertainment WeeklyCredit: IvanWeiss.London

"I knew everything about the character going in to Resident Evil 2 remake a decade ago. And as we've gone on, he's changed quite a bit because they allowed me to inject my personality, some of my colloquialisms, my mannerisms into this character," the actor continues. "I get to write a lot of the lines, I get to paraphrase, I get to recommend a lot of moves. We also do the motion capture, so his body presentation in these games, that's me. I want to keep him cool, charming, badass, capable, and just [be] true to the icon that is Leon Kennedy."

Regardless of how gamers embrace (or don't) Requiem, one person is already a massive fan. "He was in disbelief," Apostolides says in describing his brother's reaction to his Leon casting. "He couldn't believe it, but we had to wait about two-and-a-half years for that game [RE2] to come out, and then we had to wait about six months to play because he had his schedule in Boston, I had my schedule in L.A. We waited six months to play that damn thing together. I was excited, but that's the dedication right there."

Resident Evil Requiem is available to play on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC (via Steam and the Epic Games Store).

on Entertainment Weekly

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”