Netflix’s ‘Arcane’ Stars Reveal How Many Times They Record the Pilot Episode [Exclusive]

Nearly a year and a half has already passed since the dust settled on the second and final season of Netflix‘s smash-hit League of Legends series, Arcane, and since its inception, it still stands as a bit of a rarity. The series was created by Christian Linke and Alex Yee, two members of the Riot Games team who originated the characters of Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) and Jinx (Ella Purnell) well before the possibility of a show was on the table. Despite a lack of experience in constructing television animation, they managed to produce an Emmy and Annie-winning juggernaut viewed as one of the greatest video game adaptations ever made, with jaw-dropping visuals by Studio Fortiche. As actors J.B. Blanc and Jason Spisak can attest, the lengthy process of getting there was far from typical for a project of its kind.

The voices of Vander/Warwick and Silco attended Calgary Expo this weekend for a panel moderated by Collider’s Maggie Lovitt that dug deep into all things Arcane. At one moment, they were asked about how the writing from Linke, Yee, Amanda Overton, and the team, combined with the overall high production value, pushed them to new heights in the booth. The biggest factor in the series’ favor, Spisak said, was time. The demands of streaming tend to be at odds with the painstaking nature of animation, especially in the case of a show like Arcane with its boundary-pushing work, but that simply wasn’t a worry for the production, which was given the room to perfect everything down to individual scenes with everyone involved in the process.

“Simply the amount of time that they had was a luxury. Typically in animation, it’s a bit more… it’s not a factory, but they’re pressed for time, so you don’t have the diligence to really, truly explore a scene or even revisit it at times if they thought that you did something that didn’t quite work with what this person did, and they bring it back, and they ask you to do it again. One of the biggest gifts we got on the show was just the luxury of taking our time. We got a chance to do a scene multiple times in multiple ways and really feel it out. And then Christian or Alex, or David [Dunne], would ask us, ‘What do you think about that?'”

Collider Exclusive · Sci-Fi Survival Quiz
Which Sci-Fi World Would You Survive?
The Matrix · Mad Max · Blade Runner · Dune · Star Wars

Five universes. Five completely different ways the future went wrong — or sideways, or up in flames. Only one of them is the world your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out which dystopia, galaxy, or desert wasteland you’d actually make it out of alive.

💊The Matrix

🔥Mad Max

🌧️Blade Runner

🏜️Dune

🚀Star Wars

TEST YOUR SURVIVAL →

01

You sense something is deeply wrong with the world around you. What do you do?
The first instinct is often the truest one.

APull on every thread until I understand the system — then figure out how to break it.
BStop asking questions and start stockpiling — food, fuel, weapons. Questions don’t keep you alive.
CKeep my head down, observe carefully, and trust no one until I know who’s pulling the strings.
DStudy the patterns. Every system has a rhythm — learn it, and you learn how to survive it.
EFind the people fighting back and join them. You can’t fix a broken galaxy alone.

NEXT QUESTION →

02

In a world of scarcity, what resource do you guard most fiercely?
What we protect reveals what we believe survival actually requires.

AKnowledge. If you understand the system, you don’t need resources — you can generate them.
BFuel. Everything else — movement, power, escape — runs on it.
CTrust. In a world of fakes and informants, a truly reliable ally is rarer than any commodity.
DWater. And after water, information — the two things empires are truly built on.
EShips and credits. The galaxy is big — you survive it by being able to move through it freely.

NEXT QUESTION →

03

What kind of threat keeps you up at night?
Fear is useful data — if you’re honest about what you’re actually afraid of.

AThat reality itself is a lie — that everything I experience has been constructed to keep me compliant.
BA raid. No warning, no mercy — just the roar of engines and then nothing left.
CBeing identified. Once someone with power decides you’re a problem, you’re already out of time.
DBeing outmanoeuvred — losing a political game I didn’t even know I was playing.
EThe Empire tightening its grip until there’s nowhere left to run.

NEXT QUESTION →

04

How do you deal with authority you don’t trust?
Every dystopia has a power structure. Your approach to it determines everything.

ASubvert it from the inside — learn its rules well enough to weaponise them against it.
BIgnore it and stay out of its reach. The further from any power structure, the better.
CAppear to comply while doing exactly what I need to do. Visibility is the enemy.
DManoeuvre within it carefully. You can’t beat a system you refuse to understand.
EResist openly when I have to. Some things are worth the risk of being seen.

NEXT QUESTION →

05

Which environment could you actually endure long-term?
Survival isn’t just tactical — it’s physical, psychological, and very much about where you are.

AUnderground bunkers and server rooms — cramped, artificial, but with access to everything that matters.
BOpen wasteland — brutal sun, no shelter, constant movement. At least the threat is honest.
CA dense, rain-soaked city where you can disappear into the crowd and nobody asks questions.
DMerciless desert — extreme heat, no water, and something enormous living beneath the sand.
EThe fringe — backwater planets and busy spaceports where the Empire’s attention rarely reaches.

NEXT QUESTION →

06

Who do you want in your corner when things fall apart?
The company you keep is the clearest signal of who you actually are.

AA tight crew of believers who’ve seen behind the curtain and have nothing left to lose.
BOne or two people I’d trust with my life. Any more than that and someone talks.
CNobody, ideally. Alliances are liabilities. I work alone unless I have no choice.
DA community bound by shared hardship and mutual survival — people who need each other to last.
EA ragtag team with wildly different skills and total commitment when it counts.

NEXT QUESTION →

07

Where do you draw the line — if you draw one at all?
Every survivor eventually faces a moment that tests what they’re actually made of.

AI won’t harm the innocent — even the ones who’d report me without hesitation.
BI do what I have to to protect the people I’ve chosen. Everything else is negotiable.
CThe line shifts depending on who’s asking and what’s at stake.
DI draw a long-term line — nothing that compromises my people’s future, even if it’d help now.
ESome lines, once crossed, can’t be uncrossed. I know which ones they are.

NEXT QUESTION →

08

What would actually make survival worth it?
Staying alive is one thing. Having a reason to is another.

AWaking others up — dismantling the illusion so no one else has to live inside it.
BFinding somewhere — or someone — worth protecting. A reason to keep moving.
CAnswers. Understanding what I am, what any of this means, before time runs out.
DLegacy — shaping the future in a way that outlasts me by generations.
EFreedom — for myself, for others, for every world still living under someone else’s boot.

REVEAL MY WORLD →

Your Fate Has Been Calculated
You’d Survive In…

Your answers point to the world your instincts were built for. This is the universe your temperament, your survival instincts, and your particular brand of stubbornness were made for.

The Resistance, Zion

The Matrix

You took the red pill a long time ago — probably before anyone offered it to you. You’re a systems thinker who can’t help but notice the seams in things.

• You’re drawn to understanding how the system works before figuring out how to break it.
• You’d find the Resistance, or it would find you — your instinct for spotting constructed realities is the machines’ worst nightmare.
• You function best when you have access to information and the freedom to act on it.
• The Matrix built an airtight prison. You’d be the one probing the walls for the door.

The Wasteland

Mad Max

The wasteland doesn’t reward the clever or the well-connected — it rewards those who are hard to kill and harder to break. That’s you.

• You don’t need comfort, community, or a cause larger than the next horizon.
• You need a vehicle, a clear threat, and enough fuel to outrun it — and you’re good at all three.
• You are unsentimental enough to survive that world, and decent enough — just barely — to be something more than another raider.
• In the wasteland, that distinction is everything.

Los Angeles, 2049

Blade Runner

You’d survive here because you know how to exist in moral grey areas without losing yourself completely.

• You read people accurately, keep your circle small, and ask the questions others prefer not to answer.
• In a city where humanity is a legal designation rather than a feeling, you hold onto something that keeps you functional.
• You’re not a hero. But you’re not lost, either.
• In Blade Runner’s world, that distinction is everything.

Arrakis

Dune

Arrakis is the most hostile environment in the known universe — and you are precisely the kind of person it rewards.

• Patience, discipline, and political awareness are your core strengths — and on Arrakis, they’re survival tools.
• You understand that the long game matters more than any single victory.
• Others come to Dune and are consumed by it. You’d learn its logic and earn its respect.
• In time, you wouldn’t just survive Arrakis — you’d begin to reshape it.

A Galaxy Far, Far Away

Star Wars

The galaxy far, far away is vast, loud, and in a constant state of violent political upheaval — and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

• You find meaning in being part of something larger than yourself — a cause, a crew, a rebellion.
• You’d gravitate toward the Rebellion, or the fringes, or whatever pocket of the galaxy still believes the Empire’s grip can be broken.
• You fight — not because you have to, but because standing aside isn’t something you’re capable of.
• In Star Wars, that willingness is what makes all the difference.

↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ

‘Arcane’ Was the Result of Nearly a Decade of Work

Linke’s idea for Arcane stems back to 2015 and Riot’s general expansion of the League of Legends brand beyond the world-famous MOBA. For much of the time since then, Blanc and Spisak have been involved, with the former recalling getting to work on it roughly “nine years ago. Ten years ago, we first recorded.” Back then, the version of the show that Linke and Yee were making was a far cry from the final fateful conflict between sisters and cities that the show ultimately presented. The pilot alone evolved to an unprecedented degree for a typical television show. “There were 60 drafts of the pilot,” Spisak chimed in. “That’s unheard of!”

It wasn’t just drafts that got tossed in the bin, either. “They made a whole pilot, and scrapped it!” Blanc revealed. Alas, he couldn’t share many details from what that first opening looked like, though not because he’s required to keep quiet. “I wouldn’t remember because I’m old and stupid.” Spisak, for his part, wasn’t even present at the time. “No, because I wasn’t in here for the pilot. There was a pilot before the pilot I was in, so I was in the second one.”

The mere existence of another first episode, aside from what viewers see with Powder and Vi being taken in by Vander after their parents’ death and featuring material that didn’t make it to the screen at all, is a testament to how committed to perfection everyone involved in Arcane was, from the creators to Netflix, Riot Games, and Fortiche. Shows don’t typically throw away pilots and decide to make a new one that often, especially not in the case of an already wildly expensive project like this. Just so you know, this is unheard of,” Blanc asserted. “No one has that much money and time, right?” Spisak joked that it was all thanks to Riot’s oodles of cash from cosmetics and other little purchases around League. “We thank you for all your microtransactions!”

The Cast and Structure of ‘Arcane’ Were Ever-Evolving Early On

Both Spisak and Blanc are among the earliest surviving cast members to make it into the final cut of Arcane, led by Steinfeld and Purnell with Katie Leung, Mick Wingert, Kevin Alejandro, Toks Olagundoye, Harry Lloyd, and more. “They changed the cast a number of times, and Jason and I seemed to keep surviving that, and we’d be quite uncomfortable, like, ‘You know that thing we did? Is that still a thing?'” Blanc recalled ‘”Nope, I haven’t heard I’m off the show, have you?”‘ his co-star added, remembering the long waits between updates. If the constant changes weren’t unusual enough, the lack of communication as the gears turned behind the scenes was especially confusing for the veteran voice actors. Blanc spoke to how long of a wait there was after doing the pilot, adding, “We recorded that, then didn’t record anything for a year and a half. So you kind of go, ‘That doesn’t feel like I have a job anymore.'”

There was an extreme level of secrecy to the whole affair, Spisak recalled. “It’s not like they were like, ‘Oh, don’t worry, you’re still in the show. You would never get that from them. No communication at all.” Unlike Blanc, his experience doesn’t even come from the very beginning of Arcane‘s inception. Before he was cast as the Zaunite crime lord Silco, the actor known for everything from Young Justice to Piranha 3D, and Fallout: New Vegas, had no idea who was originally tapped for his role, or if Silco, as we know him, even existed in his current state back then. “I don’t know the answer to that. I think there might have been another actor playing him.”

When he was brought on board, Spisak recalled the second pilot looking more familiar to what viewers eventually saw, albeit in a different order. The version he saw featured the same gorgeous animation, though it also contained a memorable speech from Silco that wouldn’t be heard until Episode 3. In fact, the entire episode would be folded back into the first batch release that viewers received back in November 2021.

“By the second round of the pilot, the opening of the entire pilot was actually the monologue at the beginning of episode three. So they made a pilot, and then chopped it into the first three episodes. So a whole pilot opened with ‘Do you ever wonder what it’s like to drown? It’s the story of opposites.’ And I mean, when they played that pilot on the screen, it was just mind-blowingly beautiful. It was the most beautiful piece of animation I’d ever seen. And then we heard nothing. We watched the pilot on-screen, then heard nothing for like a year.”

‘Arcane’s Unique Creative Duo Made for an Unusual Production

Perhaps the most unusual part of the project was Linke and Yee themselves. It’s not entirely unheard of for a video game creator to helm its adaptation — see Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann with The Last of Us. However, the pair, despite being woven into the very fabric of who Vi and Jinx are, did not have the resumes of creators ready to make the jump into constructing an entire television show. Now the head of Riot’s animation department, Linke is a company lifer, starting as just a customer service agent in its early days before eventually being tasked with building up the music division. He and Yee are responsible for the original lyrical song for Vi in-game, as well as the music video for Jinx’s track, “Get Jinxed.”

Yet, as their career arc showed, they’ve always been capable of defying expectations, even before delivering their magnum opus. Their lack of experience in the job certainly threw Blanc, whose voice-acting career stems back to classic anime like the original Hellsing and games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, for a loop. Nonetheless, he was fascinated in a completely new way by what Linke and Yee were creating, even if they inevitably had a lot of learning to do and a few stumbles along the way.

“The truth is that you’ve got two people from the music department to write the angles, who’re starting to conceive and build an animated series, which has nothing to do with video games. It’s just a completely different beast. So, very early on, it was like, these guys really don’t know what they’re doing. We worked in animation for years, they didn’t know, but they were on to something. I didn’t know what it was, I couldn’t quantify it, I couldn’t say, ‘Oh, this is going to be brilliant,’ no. There was just something that was like a little thread that you start pulling on.”

Spisak was hit with a very similar feeling and chalked it up to the sheer determination of the duo. “You felt as though they wouldn’t give up until it was right. That was it. Even though they were fumbling around it a bit — they didn’t really have an animation pipeline; they had never made an animated series — you felt it when you were in the room with them.” They approached the process of creating an animated show unlike anything he had experienced. Perhaps the greatest example was when Spisak was in the booth as Silco, and both Linke and Yee were there to hear him give his sinister delivery up close and personal to ensure he infused it all with the exact feeling they wanted from the purveyor of Shimmer.

“When you go into a callback for a voiceover job. You’ve read at home, you’ve read the audition, whatever, you’ve listened to them. And they call you back in, you go to the studio, the creators and writers are there, and you’re typically on one side of the glass. There’s glass and the sound engineers and writers and everybody… you, as the voice actor, are inside the booth, on this side of the glass. We get ready to do the callback, and Christian and Alex, the creators of Arcane, walk up to the door of the booth, open it, and they come in and sit inside the booth with me. That is not how it is done. I don’t think I’ve ever had… because they wanted to see in my eyes, and they wanted to make sure they knew and understood. They’re like, ‘We want his voice to envelop you like smoke and convince you to do his bidding.’ That’s one of the things they said about Silco. And I’m like, ‘This is awesome.’ It’s so beautiful to have people who are creatively invested and dedicated to the point that they don’t want to be on the other side of the glass.”

Despite Its Evolution, the Vision for ‘Arcane’s Characters Remained

Linke and Yee’s creative dedication to finding the right people to bring to life Piltover and Zaun’s most important figures shows how serious they were about making Arcane as perfect as it could be and how clear a vision they had for each character. For Blanc, there were very few changes to how Vander was characterized from the first time he was introduced to Vi and Powder’s adoptive father. Moreover, as a League of Legends veteran, the team was ready and willing to let him aboard right off the bat. “The character was the same from the beginning for me,” he revealed. “I don’t think I auditioned. I have this long history with League of Legends. I play a character called Braum in League of Legends, and I thought, ‘They’re making an animated series based on League of Legends, this is going to be crazy!’

What did change, however, was his expectations for what a League series could be. The Rift is full of over 170 colorful champions that range from the imposing, like Vi or Warwick, to the zany, like the eccentric Yordle scientist Heimerdinger. Having voiced the jolly Braum, Blanc came in with an energy that, initially, did not fit the dramatic, tragic, prestige storytelling that would make Arcane a critical darling. Yet, once he was in the door and on the same page with what was required of him, it all clicked. “It was immediate — and this is so rare, I can’t tell you how rare that happens — it was an immediate affinity for the character. I immediately got him, I immediately understood him, I immediately wanted to make him as fully developed as I could. And that just doesn’t happen. You’re always trying to fit around characters, and I just knew who he was.”

Again, that experience wasn’t unique to Blanc. “Yeah, same here,” Spisak added. “The first moment I had Silco in front of me, that’s fairly what you see.” His Episode 3 monologue, which he also read for his audition, helped him buy into the character immediately, and the complicated journey he would go on, from his reign over Zaun to his relationship with Powder/Jinx, which, despite his manipulation, was founded on genuine care.

“The moment I read that, that was the audition material. The audition material was the monologue from the beginning of Episode 3, which was the beginning of the pilot at the time. ‘Ever wondered what it’s like to drown?’ And the words in that monologue are so specific, and they say so much about who Silco is, and the moment I read it, I just connected with it. And that is quite rare. Sometimes you have to dig, you have to bring your intuition in some manner.”

Both actors also agreed that their respective parts were practically made for them, something Blanc insinuates Linke and Yee might’ve recognized themselves. “That’s also very clever of people to find the right role at the right time, right when you’re ready to play it. I had just been through a horrible divorce, I was fighting for custody, and all of that stuff is like, ‘Whoa, life really doesn’t take…'” Before he could finish, Spisak chimed in, adding, “Yeah, it arrived into my life at the right time as well. So, I don’t want to say we were meant to play these roles, but it’s kind of hard to argue any other way.” That said, Blanc did jokingly mention that Spisak wasn’t there for the first pilot, so perhaps there was someone else who would’ve been perfect for the part. “Yeah, that’s true. But anyone else who can say that isn’t here!”

Spisak also mentioned that he didn’t know exactly what Silco would look like when he began filming, only that he had his scar and other key physical elements. It was only later — after they recorded him in the booth and sent that footage away to the animators — that he would learn what Silco’s final appearance would be: his own face. “That is the biggest compliment that could ever be made. To have your visage immortalized by the most talented artists on the planet.”

Arcane is now streaming on Netflix. Stay tuned here at Collider for more coverage from Calgary Expo throughout the rest of the weekend.