GTA 6 NEWS · PASSING THE TORCH
‘Appreciate the Fans’: GTA 5’s Cast Just Handed Jason and Lucia’s Actors the Survival Guide for GTA 6 Fame
Three weeks before Grand Theft Auto VI turns two unknown actors into two of the most recognized faces on the planet, the people who lived through the last version of that whirlwind have some advice for them. The stars behind GTA 5’s Franklin, Michael, and Trevor — plus the voice of CJ from San Andreas — were asked what Jason and Lucia’s actors should know before November 19 launches them into a fame nobody in games has really had to handle since, well, GTA 5. Their answer, delivered in an interview with All Out Gaming at MCM Comic Con and reported by IGN, boils down to three words: appreciate the fans. Because, as Michael De Santa himself puts it, fake appreciation is something they can smell.
What Happened: The OGs Speak
The setup is simple and a little poignant. GTA 6’s dual protagonists, Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, are being played by actors Rockstar still has not officially named — fans are convinced they’ve identified Lucia’s performer, but nothing is confirmed. Whoever they are, their lives change on November 19. So All Out Gaming took the question to the people who know exactly what that feels like: Shawn ‘Solo’ Fonteno (Franklin Clinton), Ned Luke (Michael De Santa), and Young Maylay, the voice of Carl ‘CJ’ Johnson from San Andreas.
CJ’s advice was the shortest and possibly the wisest: “Have fun.” Fonteno went practical. “To be honest, just listen to what Rockstar says,” he said. “They’re gonna lead you in the right direction. … But get ready. That’s all I can say, is get ready. It’s a ride that they’re gonna be on for a while.” Thirteen years after GTA 5 launched, Fonteno and Luke are still doing convention circuits, still posing with fans, still watching their characters anchor memes, mods and retrospectives declaring GTA 5 the series’ peak. The ride genuinely never ended.
Ned Luke’s contribution is the one IGN put in the headline, and it deserves it: “Just make sure that you appreciate the fans. Let the fans know… fake appreciation, they can smell it. You have to really appreciate them, genuinely, because what we have is because of them. If you don’t have the fans, you don’t got nothin’. They’re the game, and that’s the bottom line.” From the actor who spent five years playing a man faking an appreciation for a life he couldn’t stand, the warning lands.
The Generational Handoff, in Young Maylay’s Words
The most thoughtful answer came from the longest-tenured voice in the room. Young Maylay has been CJ for over two decades, and he framed the GTA 6 cast’s situation as a generational relay. “We’ll always be the characters that we are, and for the generation of kids who are coming up, you’re gonna have certain brackets,” he said. “Right now, I got all the OGs. Everybody coming in my line — you catch some youngsters, but you got guys with the grey hair coming in saying, ‘Hey man! You’re the guy, CJ!’ And they [the GTA 5 cast] have all the youngsters right now.”
His point to Jason and Lucia’s actors: the spotlight doesn’t transfer, it accumulates. “During this time period, you’re gonna grow with your fanbase… we’ll always be those characters, and you can’t take that from us.” It’s a strange kind of inheritance: CJ’s OGs, Franklin and Michael’s youngsters, and now a whole new bracket forming around two characters the world meets in three weeks — characters whose designs fans have tracked frame-by-frame since the first trailer.
The One Dissenter: Trevor’s ‘Nothing Inside’
For balance, IGN noted the cast’s warmth isn’t universal. Steven Ogg, Trevor’s actor, famously said he feels “nothing inside” about GTA 6 — he’s not a gamer and has never played a video game. His contribution to the torch-passing conversation was a 2025 suggestion that Rockstar kill Trevor off in GTA 6’s opening as a thank-you to fans: “Pass the torch, stomp Trevor’s head in, and sort of put an end to that and allow a new generation to take over.” It’s the perfect inversion of Ned Luke’s advice — one actor telling the newcomers to cherish the fans, another volunteering his own character as the ceremony’s sacrifice. (For the record: GTA 5’s Deathwish ending is the canon one, so a Trevor cameo is at least technically possible.)
What This Means for GTA 6
First: the fame math is genuinely unprecedented. GTA 5 shipped 200-plus million copies and made its trio of mid-tier actors immortal. GTA 6 arrives as the most pre-ordered entertainment product ever, with a purchase-intent record Circana called rare cultural territory, a real-world Vice City takeover of Miami already lit on the Kaseya Center, and a launch so expected that workplaces are bracing for a November 19 PTO spike. Whoever plays Jason and Lucia walks into that on day one, anonymous no more. Fonteno’s “get ready” is not a figure of speech.
Second: the anonymity is the point. Rockstar’s decision to keep its leads uncredited this late is itself a story — fans have done the detective work on Lucia (the Manni L. Perez theory, still a rumor), but the studio has never blinked. Ned Luke’s advice presumes the eventual reveal, the convention lines, the decades of “you’re the guy!” If GTA 6’s cast stays hidden forever, the OGs’ advice becomes a time capsule; if not, it becomes a manual. Either way, the actors who gave it are proof the ride never really stops — which is exactly what they said.
Third: this is the marketing cycle weaponizing nostalgia on schedule. Every passing-the-torch beat — Ogg’s kill-Trevor pitch, the OGs’ advice reel, the Hollywood directors planning around November 19 — is the culture pre-gaming a launch that needs no help. Three weeks out, the machine is running itself.
So there it is: have fun, listen to Rockstar, get ready, and never fake the appreciation. The most successful cast in gaming history just wrote the welcome card for its successors. If you’re counting down with the rest of us, GTA 6 on PS5 and on Xbox Series X|S are still available to pre-order ahead of the November 19 launch — and one day soon, somebody is going to say “you’re the guy, Jason” to an actor whose name we don’t know yet.
The torch is lit. Twenty-one days.
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