How the Team Behind Far Cry 6 Finished a Game in Lockdown

In March 2020, game creators at Ubisoft's Toronto studio had just finished wrapping up the "primo moments" of Far Cry 6's scenes with Breaking Bad's villain Giancarlo Esposito and Coco's young dreamer Anthony Gonzalez when Covid-19 became very real, very quickly. The borders between the US and Canada were about to shut down, and the team was anxious to bag the footage they needed before getting the American actors safely and quickly on a plane back home. The first-person shooter game hinged on performances of the A-list actors, Esposito and Gonzalez, who play Anton and Diego Castillo, a president-dictator and his son from Yara, "a tropical paradise frozen in time." Esposito and Gonzalez made it out of Canada just before the first lockdown, but Ubisoft was still facing a dilemma. The game's release was set for less than a year away, and the whole opening scene--arguably the most important sequence of the entire game--hadn't yet been shot.