“It’s super popular, and the fastest-selling video game on the [PlayStation] platform,” says Oyoung via a Zoom call from his Los Angeles home.

“I always wanted to act on a big production, and I never thought I would be doing so in a video game. I always thought I would be doing stunt work, and roles in film and TV.

“I remember when it was announced for the first time, and nobody knew who I was. But fast forward to now, and people know and recognise the character, and it’s become everything I wanted it to be.”

The comic-book world is one in which Oyoung, born in the United States to Taiwanese immigrants, has long felt comfortable. He recalls being an avid comic-book collector during high school.

Mister Negative was an elusive, lesser-known figure – it has been primarily through the game series that the character has attained some notoriety; Martin Li/Mister Negative is two sides of the same person – a wealthy and benevolent philanthropist and his alter ego, a ruthless crime boss who faces off against Spider-Man.

Oyoung says that while Mister Negative is “supposed to be a bad guy, I wanted to make him sympathetic, give him character. He’s remorseful. He’s done some bad things. His soul is heavy.”

In taking on the role, Oyoung was able to combine his love for the comic-book genre with his passion for martial arts and acting – something he began doing in school plays from the age of seven.

His father was an engineer and his mother a social worker – they came to the US as students from Taiwan in the 1970s – and were supportive of his career choice.

“My parents gave me a lot of leeway,” he says.

“But his parents said no, so my dad became an engineer instead,” Oyoung says. “When my dad asked me what I wanted to do, and I said martial arts and acting, they were generous.

“They gave me 10 years to make it, and said if I couldn’t do it in that time, I should go back to school.”

He began working in the stunt industry – he was taught kung fu by his father – and worked on films such as Legion, The Last Airbender, Thor and Olympus Has Fallen.

In many resects, Oyoung says, all his previous experience could be viewed as training for the Mister Negative video game role.

“Video games are a lot like theatre; once you’re on the stage, there are cameras around you 360 degrees.” Trackers are placed on the actors’ costumes and movement data is collected in real time.

“The only encumbrance is that you don’t have a stage and you don’t have a lot of realistic props, but we still had fun with it.

“And I did feel that everything I’d done in my past – the background work, the fight choreography, the stunt coordination – was leading up to something, and that a lot of my skills and experiences culminated in this role.”

Oyoung has noticed a “quantitative difference” in the number of auditions he is getting these days, “with so many more people of colour not only in front of the camera, but also producing and writing”, compared to the start of his career where he would be sent out on only one or two auditions a year.

He was working on a sequel to 1996 film Twister when it got shut down as a result of the strike. And he has signed to a “giant video-game production” that will be announced soon.

There has been talk brewing of a similar strike or shutdown in the video-game production world because AI is increasingly being used to stand in for live actors – something that Oyoung believes should never happen.

“How is it expected to replace creatives, writers and artists? What kind of a dystopia do we live in where it takes over that? Live art is the expression of the human spirit,” he says.

“The only reason I got into acting was to express myself, and I don’t think a machine should do that. People say you can’t stop the future, but if that’s the future, just put me on a desert island. I don’t want to be a part of it.”