4 days ago
Gabe Kunda Is Ready to Be Your Next Blade
Every Marvel Rivals season brings a new pair of heroes with it, and after opening season three with Jean Grey, this week sees Blade take center stage. While dataminers determined well ahead of time that he'd be popping in, the vampire hunter was teased in the game's earlier, Dracula-related season. Now, he's woken out of bed, and players are eager to get their hands on a character they've known and loved since they first saw Wesley Snipes enter that nightclub in 1998.
You can count Gabe Kunda among those lovers. The actor, whose voice you've heard in various movie promos and in games like Apex Legends (as Newcastle) and Date Everything (Tyrell), is playing Blade for Marvel's hero shooter, and has a lot of affection for the character. Not only is Snipes '[his Blade]' and the first film his favorite of the trilogy, he likened Snipes' live-action turn to being as definitive as Robert Downey Jr. was for Iron Man. And while Kunda looked toward J.D. Hall's version in the 1994 Spider-Man cartoon and praised the respective performances of Imari Williams and Michael Jai White in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 and Marvel's Midnight Sons, it's Snipes that largely informed his portrayal for Rivals, which he believes was the same for his voice acting predecessors.
'Nine times out of 10, the audience will compare us to Wesley, so if you go outside the orbit, it starts to feel off. The map has been laid out, and we follow that,' Kunda told io9. 'But I tried to avoid going too carbon copy [with my voice]. You can't do better than what he did, but you can add a little bit of yourself in to help stand out.'
These days, Blade's biggest problem isn't standing out, but showing up: since Kevin Feige and Mahershala Ali took to the stage at 2019's San Diego Comic-Con to reveal the character was coming to the MCU, his solo movie has struggled to get made. For those wanting a specific vampire-killing fix, Wesley Snipes in 2024's Deadpool & Wolverine had your back. (Or more recently, Sinners.) Meanwhile, in games, we learned in late 2023 that Dishonored studio Arkane was taking its own stab at the character, but that project is years away, and something Kunda knows nothing about. He recalled auditioning for Blade in a Marvel game project back in 2024, but he didn't know it was for Rivals specifically. It wasn't until after the game's reveal that he put two and two together—and he got the part shortly after expressing his hopes for it at San Diego Comic-Con that same year.
This is CRAZY. This was July 2024…
Literally a week or so later I got the call….mannnnnn…….😭🥹
— Gabe Kunda (@GabeKunda) July 30, 2025Blade is Marvel Rivals' 41st character, and a cast that big means people get to talking. Before a match starts, different pairings will banter, which helps inform what universe a character is from, how they feel about others, or potentially tease new heroes to join the fray. Without a firm narrative established in-game or through its seasonal cinematics (like in similar titles), these interactions can pull double duty as character development and fan fodder, and there are entire fandom subsects devoted to posting and analyzing pre-match dialogue.
For Kunda and the other actors, these are also where they'd get the most direction during recording sessions. Whereas general barks or lines from season three's reveal trailer could be done as is, he said pre-fight dialogue required 'a lot of context for why I'm speaking to Storm or Black Panther this way, or why I'm talking about Captain America being a wolf.' That guidance was also helpful in a real-world sense in keeping him from getting lost in the fanboy sauce: as a self-professed fan of voice actors like Steve Blum (Wolverine) and Yuri Lowenthal (Spider-Man), the voice direction ensured he was talking to them as their in-game characters rather than the performers he grew up loving with the rest of us.
That singular focus has also kept Kunda from thinking too far ahead when it comes to Blade's future. Rivals' voice cast has a lot of repeat Marvel actors, from the aforementioned Blum and Lowenthal to Laura Bailey (Black Widow) and James Mathis III (Black Panther), among plenty others. When asked about this, Kunda acknowledged how continuity can exist between different projects, allowing for performers to come back. For himself, he's trying to avoid viewing Rivals in that light, just as he also doesn't feel a particular weight about voicing a version of Blade that could be in audiences' minds for the next few years—Marvel Rivals is a popular game right now, but that doesn't inherently make his performance definitive. And if he did reprise the role in another project, he noted it could be something 'all different' from this particular take.
If there's anything Blade-related in the future that Kunda's thinking about, it's what future creatives will do with the character post-Rivals. 'They could go after Wesley's version, or Michael's, Imari's, or mine,' he suggested. Alternatively, he believes someone could go their own way and find a new angle on the character that proves to be iconic in its own right. Echoing similar thoughts from the reboot film's first director, Bassam Tariq, Kunda called Blade a character who lacks a hard canon compared to big-name heroes like Spider-Man or Captain America.
With that freedom in mind, Kunda just wants to be 'the best Blade that I can be' for Marvel Rivals. And with Blade hitting the game on Friday, August 8, Kunda will spend this weekend streaming himself playing his new character, or Black Panther, on Twitch.
Blade comes to Marvel Rivals as part of its season 3.5 update tomorrow, August 8.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
