Nick landed in Los Angeles at the end of 2018 with confidence, demo reels, and a realist's read on the odds, and he started booking commercials right away. He had also made an unofficial contract with himself before he left: no side jobs, at least one year as nothing but an actor, and an expectation that he would hit rock bottom at least twice. He did, owing more than he had in the bank and refusing to ask anyone for money, convinced the dues were part of the package. Video games had already been quietly seeded years earlier by America Young, an actress he met on an independent fan film, who explained that she did body movement for games like Call of Duty; a light went on, because he had been playing since 1989 and had never once considered it a viable path for an actor. Her leads got no traction, but then a casting call for a triple A lead appeared that he was certain was Resident Evil. It was the first video game audition he ever submitted. He drilled firearms and tactical movement with his friend James, worked physical gestures with theater actor Darren Bailey, lost eight pounds living at the gym, and walked in carrying eighteen years of love for the franchise and the belief that nobody auditioning knew it better. He booked it a couple of months after that all time low, and it changed his trajectory. Playing Leon S. Kennedy meant filling shoes he had worshipped; Paul Mercier's 2005 performance was one of the reasons he wanted to act in the first place, and all Nick wanted was to do the character justice. Capcom told him they had cast him because they saw a young Leon in him, and to stop copying and just inject his own personality. Performance director Tom Keegan finished the job, stripping the zombie apocalypse out of every scene and asking what would Nick do, until the honesty came out on its own. His first game was also his first voiceover work, and he committed to it hard enough that while recording death screams with his own hands around his throat, he passed out cold against the back of the booth; Capcom loved the take so much they put it in the game. Resident Evil 2 wrapped in 2018, and three years later they came back for Resident Evil 4, the game that had been his favorite for sixteen years and which he had beaten fifty times. By then the trust was total. He wrote, worked closely with the director and the localization director, and helped shape the older, more cowboy version of Leon he had wanted from the start. Both games were nominated for Game of the Year. The character carried him further, into the Netflix series Infinite Darkness in Japan, where a stunt team finally let the self-described stunt capable actor do his own work, and into the meat puppet days of games like Medal of Honor, where he played roughly a thousand Nazis. Then a different kind of opportunity fell in his lap and he took it, stepping away from the volume for much of four years to shoot 31 episodes of a building program around the world, partnering with nonprofits on community projects that had to improve many thousands of lives. He calls it the most fulfilling work he has ever done.

Nowadays, the thing Nick is chasing is not another credit, it is balance. Somewhere between 800 and 1,000 flights since 2018, thirty-something trips out of a fifty-two week year, and he is candid about the toll: he gives everything he has to whatever room he is standing in, and by the time he gets home there is nothing left over for himself. He wants to move from seventy-thirty back toward fifty-fifty, and he names that as his goal every year. What steadies him is a small set of ideas he actually lives by. Wabi-sabi, the Japanese notion of finding beauty in the impermanence of things, which he boils down to appreciating a moment while you have it, the same lesson as the Spanish quote he had translated off a bakery wall in Honduras: don't cry because it ended, smile because it happened. Optimism as a permanent filter, silver linings pried out of even the bad days. Being real rather than networking, because people hire the person they would have a beer with. And trusting your instincts, since "leap and the net will appear" is the only reason he is here at all. Conventions taught him the rest. When a young fan tells him that meeting him was the highlight of their year, he hears the compliment and the ache in it at the same time, and it is why he will not let anyone say this industry is only making video games. So what he offers young people has almost nothing to do with acting: find your flame, the thing you can do for sixteen hours without getting tired or hungry, and build your life around it. Asked what he would tell his younger self, he said he would not say a damn thing. He would just hand the kid an Oreo. And when his body finally calls it, the plan is already made: an ice cream parlor, flavors of his own invention, because nobody has ever stood in line for ice cream unhappy.