Royce was an American mercenary in Predators, played by Adrien Brody. Shortly after finishing a contract in Africa, he woke up falling through the sky over the Game Preserve Planet, where the Super Predators hunted killers brought from Earth. He worked out that the planet was a hunting ground, led a reluctant group of soldiers and criminals through the jungle, and freed a captive Predator in an attempt to reach a ship. Royce and the Israeli sniper Isabelle were the only humans who survived, and he gave her his name only at the end of the hunt. Later stories placed him on the preserve for months, and in a recorded debriefing Isabelle explained that he left the planet alone in a Predator ship.
Biography
Earlier Life
Most of what is known about Royce before the film comes from A Predatory Life, a backup story by David Lapham that Dark Horse ran across the four weekly issues of its Predators prequel in June 2010. Four years earlier, faulty intelligence in the Philippines led Royce to blow up a building full of terrorists without knowing that a grade school was in its basement. He never read the death toll, but he knew he had made a serious mistake. His rate doubled afterward, because employers wanted a man with no conscience, and Royce never corrected that reputation.
His last contract on Earth was in an unnamed, war-torn African country, where government soldiers stole United Nations food rations from civilians. A driver named Bapoto brought Royce to the general, who hired him to kill the rebel leader Ayotunde Kutti, whose forces held almost a third of the country, had blown up the secretary of state, and had raided an army convoy. The general also wanted Kutti's women, children, and white mercenaries killed. Royce privately despised him, but he accepted, asked for two-thirds of his fee up front, and told him to consider everyone dead.
Royce crossed the jungle on foot, covering about twenty-two miles on the first day while Bapoto, who claimed Blackwater training, struggled to keep up. Royce knew the guide had been sent to kill him after the mission so that the general could keep the rest of the fee. He slashed Bapoto across the face with a machete, mocked him with a line from Machiavelli, and finished him with a knife. Three days later he reached Kutti's village of stilt houses, and from a tree he recognized one of Kutti's mercenaries as Travis, a man he had fought beside in Pakistan.
The Contract In Africa
Although sniping was not his specialty, Royce shot one of Kutti's men from the tree and let Travis spot him. Travis took the shooter for an amateur after a reward and led most of the soldiers and mercenaries into the jungle to hunt him. Royce believed that targeting women and children was for psychos and perverts, so he avoided automatic fire and grenades near the villagers, slipped back in, and killed the remaining guards one at a time. He then burned the huts and destroyed the vehicles with grenades placed away from the fleeing civilians.
Royce burst into Kutti's headquarters, shot the men inside, and cornered the rebel leader beside a bookshelf. Kutti called the government butchers and offered to pay more, but Royce answered that he had a contract and shot him. Moments later he fired through a curtain at movement in the next room and mortally wounded Amina, a woman with a revolver and a crying baby, which he blamed on his own carelessness. When Travis returned, the dying woman told him that a white man had shot her, and Royce opened fire on the mercenaries crowded into the hut.
Travis ordered the survivors to break for a beach where a man named Mason waited to take them home, but Royce hunted down the men who ran, telling himself it was in his contract and admitting that he enjoyed it. He caught Travis at a jeep on a riverbank, whose driver had been shot dead. Travis called Royce's employers monsters, but Royce said it was not his problem, called himself the bad guy in every story, and shot his old comrade. As he walked away, a Predator watched him through its heat vision, and the comic ended with its laser sight on him.
Waking In Freefall
Royce regained consciousness in freefall high above an unknown jungle, with no memory of being captured. A parachute strapped to his back opened automatically just before the ground, and he crashed through the trees and landed hard. Before he could get his bearings, the Mexican cartel enforcer Cuchillo and the Russian soldier Nikolai opened fire on each other nearby. Royce stopped the shooting by telling them that they were firing at the wrong people, and he asked Nikolai what he last remembered before waking up.
Each of the strangers had the same story. Nikolai had been fighting in Chechnya and Cuchillo had been in Baja California, and both remembered a bright light before they woke up falling. The Israeli Defense Forces sniper Isabelle joined them and said that she had never seen this jungle, although she had seen most of them, and the group agreed that it was too hot for the season and the land was the wrong shape for Asia or Africa. Royce showed little interest in a group discussion and set off toward the other parachutes, saying that he wanted to find out who had thrown him out of an airplane.
Strangers In The Jungle
Along the way, Royce and the others found more people who had been dropped the same way. They met the death row inmate Stans, the Sierra Leonean death squad member Mombasa, and the silent Yakuza enforcer Hanzo, each of whom had also landed by parachute with weapons and no memory of being taken. When they heard a man calling for help from a tree, Royce shot through the branch that held his parachute and dropped him to the ground. The man was Edwin, a doctor who said he had been on his way to work, and he seemed completely out of place among the armed killers.
Soon after finding Edwin, the group discovered strange skinned remains hanging in the trees, and the strangers argued about whether they were part of a test, a kidnapping, a prison experiment, or the afterlife. Royce cut the debate short by saying that the reason did not matter and that the only question was how to get out. When Isabelle reminded him that they needed to stay together, he told her that the others could follow him if they wanted. He set off for higher ground, and when Isabelle asked his name later on the march, he refused to give it and said that he worked better on his own.
The Hounds And The Game Preserve
On the march, Royce noticed that the sun had not moved since they arrived. He identified each of the others for Isabelle by their background, from the Spetsnaz Alpha Group and Los Zetas to the RUF and the Inagawa-kai, and he named Stans as one of the FBI's most wanted. He concluded that they had all been chosen because they were dangerous people, and he pointed out that Edwin did not fit the pattern. Isabelle in turn guessed that Royce was a former soldier who had gone into black operations and then mercenary work, and he did not deny it.
At the edge of the forest the group found the body of a United States Special Forces soldier who had died while making a last stand. Royce studied a deadfall the soldier had built and explained that such a trap was usually set at five times the weight of the target, which meant the man had been hunting something much larger than a human. Soon afterward a pack of Predator hounds charged out of the trees, and the group fought them off until a whistle called the animals away. Royce told the survivors to count their ammunition and explained his conclusion that the planet was a game preserve, that the humans were the game, and that the hounds had been sent in to flush them out the same way a hunter would use dogs on boar or quail.
The Hunters' Camp
After the attack, the survivors realized that Cuchillo was missing, and soon they heard him calling for help from a clearing. Royce saw at once that it was a trap, and Mombasa explained that his own militia used the same method of wounding one man and killing whoever came to save him. Royce decided to leave him, and when Isabelle went to help anyway, the group learned that Cuchillo was dead and that the voice was the hunter imitating him. Royce argued that running would only play into the hunters' game, and he decided to follow the hounds' tracks back to their source to learn what they were facing.
The tracks led to a camp where the group found cages of captured creatures and a different kind of Predator bound to a post, the Crucified Predator. Royce slipped away while the others looked around, and when the hunters attacked, he shouted for everyone to run. The survivors later accused him of using them as bait, and Royce admitted that he had hidden and watched so that he could learn who they were up against. From the attack he concluded that there was more than one hunter, that they used both projectile and energy weapons such as the plasma caster, that they had some form of cloaking device, and that they were larger, stronger, and heavier than humans.
Guatemala 1987 And The Ambush
Royce had noticed how Isabelle reacted to the creature at the camp, and he pressed her to tell the group what she knew. She described a classified report about a special forces team that had gone into the jungle in Guatemala in 1987 with a CIA liaison, a mission known from Predator. Only one man, Dutch Schaefer, survived, and his debriefing described a hunter with camouflage that adjusted to the surrounding light and eyes that saw heat signatures. The survivor had covered himself in mud to hide his body heat, and that was how he beat the creature, a detail that Royce remembered later.
Royce planned a defensive position meant to look as though the group was hiding, so that the hunters would come to them through a narrow approach covered by overlapping fields of fire. While they waited, he told Isabelle that the only difference between them was that she killed for a country and did not have to admit she enjoyed it. When she asked what had made him the way he was, he quoted Ernest Hemingway on the hunting of armed men, a passage about hunters who never cared for anything else afterward. When nothing came, Royce sent Edwin out as bait, and a large alien beast from the cages chased the doctor back to the group before a shot from an unseen gunman brought it down, a shot that Isabelle said she had missed.
Noland's Hideout
The gunman whispered to Royce from the trees and appeared behind him in scavenged armor. He was Ronald Noland, an Air Cavalry soldier who had survived on the planet for about ten hunting seasons, and he led the group to his hideout inside an abandoned drilling machine. Noland explained that the larger hunters were at war with a smaller kind, that they adapted and returned in groups of three after one of them was killed, and that he had never found the edge of the preserve. He also mentioned that the hunters had a ship about thirty yards from their camp, which gave Royce a way off the planet to aim for.
That night Isabelle told Royce about a spotter she had watched die rather than give away her position, and she suggested that they had been brought to the planet because they were predators themselves. Royce told her that he was going after the ship, and he reasoned that the captive Predator might know how to fly it and would do almost anything to be freed. Noland then tried to kill the group with smoke so that he could take their weapons, but Royce opened fire inside the metal hideout to draw the hunters to it. The Berserker Predator killed Noland, and Royce led the others out while Mombasa was killed in the attack and Nikolai went back to rescue Edwin.
The Ship And The Captive Predator
As the survivors crossed the jungle toward the ship, Stans attacked a hunter to buy them time and Hanzo stayed behind to fight the Falconer Predator, and both men were killed. Soon afterward Edwin stepped into a trap that cut deep into his leg. Royce saw that the trap was designed to maim rather than kill and told the others that the doctor would slow them down. He proposed leaving Edwin behind with explosives so that the hunters would be killed when they came to take trophies, but Isabelle refused and stayed with the wounded man. When she asked what Royce was if he would not act like a human being, he answered that he was alive, and he went on to the camp alone.
At the camp, Royce cut the Crucified Predator loose and made it understand that he wanted to be taken to the ship. The freed hunter used its wrist gauntlet to start the Predator ship and set it to leave the planet, but the Berserker returned and the two Predators fought. The Berserker killed the weakened captive and tore off its head, one of several Predator vs. Predator fights on the preserve. Royce ran toward the ship, then turned back toward Isabelle, and the vessel lifted off without him before the Berserker destroyed it with a signal from his gauntlet.
Return For Isabelle
After watching the ship lift off without him and then explode, Royce walked back into the hunters' camp and told Edwin and Isabelle that he had missed his ride. Isabelle lay paralyzed on the ground, and Edwin claimed that she had been poisoned by something in the jungle, the same paralyzing plant he had warned Royce about on the first day. In truth Edwin had used a neurotoxin on his own scalpel, and while Royce was away he had admitted to the helpless Isabelle that he was a murderer who felt at home among the monsters.
When Edwin praised Royce as a good man after all, Royce answered that he was not a good man but he was fast, and he stopped the doctor's attempt to stab him with the poisoned scalpel. He overpowered Edwin, dragged him to the center of the camp, and promised not to kill him. Instead he tied grenades from Noland's hideout to the wounded doctor's body and left him lying in the open, knowing that the hunter would come to collect a trophy. Isabelle had been against abandoning Edwin earlier, but she was in no condition to stop him.
The Final Fight With The Berserker
The Berserker, which had just killed the Crucified Predator and torn off its head, arrived at the camp and found Edwin, and the grenades went off when it reached him. The blast wounded the hunter but did not kill it. Royce remembered the story of the lone survivor from Guatemala, so he lit fires around the camp, rigged traps among them, and coated himself in mud so that the hunter's thermal vision could not separate his body heat from the flames. For a while the Berserker hunted him through the smoke without finding him.
When the hunter finally caught him, it beat Royce badly and was about to finish him when Isabelle, who had recovered enough from the neurotoxin to lift her weapon, shot it with her sniper rifle. The shot gave Royce the opening he needed, and he struck the Berserker over and over with an axe, cutting off its arm before he beheaded it. Unlike several other Predators killed by humans, the Berserker died without triggering a self-destruct device, and Royce had won the fight with a blade, the mud, the fire, and Isabelle's timely shot.
Left Stranded
With the hunter dead, Royce and Isabelle looked up to see more parachutes falling over the jungle, the next group of prey being dropped onto the preserve. Only then did he finally answer the question she had asked him on the first day, introducing himself with the words "I'm Royce," and she answered with her own name. He told her that they would find a way off the planet together, even as the next hunt was beginning around the hunters' camp.
Two Months On The Preserve
The sequel comic Predators: Preserve the Game, also published as Predators: Surviving Life, was written by David Lapham and released by Dark Horse on July 14, 2010. It opened two months after the film, with a long-haired Royce watching the sky for the hunters' ship. He believed that the ship from the film had left for Earth without him while he went back for Isabelle, and called that a stupid move. Calling himself king of the hill, he decided he would make the hunters take him home.
Each passing ship dropped a new creature, and Royce killed each one, believing that the hunters were training him. He mounted their skulls on stakes and had abandoned a set of scavenged armor as too cumbersome. Light-headed from his wounds, he admitted that he was going down the same road as Noland and the Navy SEAL before him, the road of dead loners. When another ship lowered a horned, tusked animal at night, he concluded that he would need help to survive.
At dawn he found Isabelle finishing off that animal and collapsed in front of her with an infected wound. Three days later he woke in her hollow under a bandage of leaves, and she complained that he had stayed away for weeks only to come back and die at her door. When he said that he was becoming an animal like Noland and would die alone, she answered that they were all each other had on the planet. They spent the night together.
The Four-Armed Predator
That same night an armored Predator walked out of the trees, dropped a bundle at their feet, and cloaked away without fighting. Inside was a set of Predator armor sized for a human. Moments later a ship beamed down a huge Four-Armed Predator that turned invisible, and the comic never explained whether its extra arms were natural or the result of tampering like that seen among other Predator hybrids. Royce decided that he was the hunters' champion against their strongest warrior, and that killing it would bring him a ship.
He planned to lead the creature to a waterfall ravine where Isabelle would fire the armor's shoulder cannon, but she called him a user who loved the hunt, and he shot back about the partner she had let die. The giant attacked before they were ready, and its blades cut Royce. He grabbed Isabelle and leapt off a cliff of what he guessed was a thousand feet, and the armor absorbed the landing. Hiding in a flooded tree, he put on the helmet, found that it read his brain waves, and later set the forest ablaze to cover their escape.
At the waterfall Isabelle sealed his chest wound with the armor's first-aid gear, and she pointed out that he had come back for her twice. Because the cannon was wired to his nervous system, they rigged it into a rifle that Isabelle could fire from a ledge while Royce stood below as bait. When the creature cracked his ribs he caught himself fighting alone, remembered that Travis had paid for trusting him, and refused to abandon her. He marked its vital points with cannon fire, and Isabelle hit it in the head with repeated shots until it fell.
Final Fate
The comic ended one week later, with a bandaged Royce and Isabelle watching another Predator ship cross the night sky. When she asked why he wanted to go back, he deflected by asking whether she was trying to ruin his reputation. As the ship dropped supply pods, he admitted he did not know how many creatures they would have to kill, but he was sure that they would reach home together or die on that rock together. The comic did not show how either of them left, and that answer came years later from Predator: Hunting Grounds.
Isabelle joined that game as a playable character in June 2021, and a later update added four tapes in which OWLF agent Sean Keyes debriefed her about the preserve. She described Royce as the American mercenary who survived with her, said that she never learned his last name, and explained that they grew close while recovering from their injuries. She believed that they might have left together if the hunters had not marked him as a champion and given him human-sized armor, which confirmed his old belief that people secretly enjoyed hunting men. Royce used its cloak to find a landing site with a dropship and a smaller skiff, and Isabelle expected them to escape together.
Instead, Royce said that he wanted to face the hunters, and no argument from Isabelle changed his mind. Before he left, he used the computer in his armor to unlock and prepare both ships so that one would respond to Isabelle, and then his ship disappeared into the clouds. Isabelle worked out the controls by trial and error, found Earth in a planetary directory, and landed at random in the Mexican jungle, where the OWLF recovered her craft about a year after she arrived on the planet. The tapes did not reveal where Royce went, and his last known act was flying away from the Game Preserve Planet alone.
Personality And Traits
Royce was cold, practical, and openly selfish for most of the hunt. He refused to give his name, rejected the idea of a team, and treated the others as tools that could help him survive, which led him to abandon Cuchillo, use the group as bait at the camp, send Edwin out as bait, and plan to booby-trap the wounded doctor. He openly admitted that he enjoyed hunting armed men, and he quoted Hemingway to describe it rather than apologize for it. Isabelle later said that he saw the others as disposable at first, and that earning his trust had been very difficult.
At the same time, Royce had limits. In the Africa comic he would not deliberately target women and children, although he carelessly shot an armed mother, and on the preserve he went back for Isabelle instead of escaping on the ship. He was sharply observant, the first to notice the motionless sun, the purpose of the hounds, the meaning of the deadfall, and Edwin's deception. His final choice in Hunting Grounds broke the promise he made at the end of the comic, as he chose to seek out the hunters instead of going home with Isabelle.
Skills And Equipment
Royce was a skilled tracker, tactician, and close-quarters fighter. He read tracks, traps, and the behavior of the hunters, set up ambushes and defensive positions, and used bait and misdirection against both human and alien enemies. In Africa he lured an armed force away from its leader, and on the preserve he combined the mud trick from Guatemala with fires to blind the Berserker's heat vision. He also knew the world of soldiers and criminals well enough to identify each of the strangers by their unit or organization at first sight.
His main weapon in the film was an AA-12 automatic 12-gauge shotgun with a drum magazine loaded with Frag-12 rounds and a SureFire weapon light foregrip, wrapped in tape in a pixelated camouflage pattern similar to the US Army's UCP. His sidearm was a customized modern M1911 pistol with Novak sights, a beavertail grip safety, a combat hammer, and camouflage tape on the grips. He also carried a machete and a combat knife, and he took Mk 2 grenades and a flare pistol from Noland's cache, which he used against the Berserker. The Internet Movie Firearms Database identifies these weapons and the props used for them.
In Preserve the Game, Royce first discarded a set of scavenged armor as too cumbersome, then received Predator armor built for him, which absorbed a fall from a cliff and made him faster and stronger. Its helmet read his brain waves and gave him thermal imaging and targeting data like the hunters' bio-masks, and he fought with its wrist blades and a shoulder cannon wired to his nervous system. In Hunting Grounds, Isabelle said that the armor also had a working cloak and a computer that could open and prepare Predator ships. With that equipment Royce located the hunters' landing site and launched a ship on his own.
Behind The Scenes
Adrien Brody played Royce in Predators, which was directed by Nimród Antal, produced by Robert Rodriguez, and released by 20th Century Fox in July 2010. Rodriguez told Collider that the filmmakers first approached Brody for a smaller part in an early version of the script, but Brody replied that he wanted to play the lead and sent a photograph of how he had bulked up for a prison film with Forest Whitaker. Rodriguez and Antal decided that an Oscar winner who had not played an action hero before would feel fresher than the actors who usually took such roles. Brody admitted at a 2010 press event that he was not the obvious choice and said that he would not have been on the studio's list.
Brody said that he put on about 25 pounds of muscle for the role, trained six days a week, and lifted heavy weights for the first time since college. He told Metro and other outlets that he avoided sugar, alcohol, and sex during production in order to stay focused and aggressive. The film was shot partly in the tropical rainforest of Hawaii, where Brody stayed on the estate property instead of in a hotel and spent his nights reading survival manuals, military training books, and Sun Tzu. Brody said that he wanted Royce to be a flawed, tragic hero who won through tactics and awareness rather than a typical physically imposing action character.
Merchandise
The best-known Royce collectible is the Hot Toys 1/6th scale Royce figure from the Movie Masterpiece series, product number MMS131. Hot Toys announced it in August 2010 for the fourth quarter of that year, and Hot Toys Japan lists its release as November 2010. The figure stands about 30 centimeters tall on a muscular body with more than 30 points of articulation, and its hand-painted head sculpt of Adrien Brody was sculpted by Eom Jea Sung of GOX and painted by JC. Hong.
The costume included a light brown shirt, a white undershirt, a brown and yellow scarf, blue-black pants with pouches, black boots, and a tactical vest with a holster and sixteen shotgun shells. The Hot Toys figure came with a pistol, a shotgun, a machete with a sheath, a combat knife, an axe, a watch, and four interchangeable gloved hands. It was packed in a flip-top window box with a figure base that carried a Royce nameplate and the Predators logo.
Famous Quotes
- "So I can figure out who threw me out of a fucking airplane."
- "We need to stick together." / "Then you should follow me."
- "This planet is a game preserve. And we're the game."
- "How do you know this?" / "Because that's what I would do."
- "There is no hunting like the hunting of a man. And those who've hunted armed men long enough, and like it, never really care for anything else thereafter."
- "You are a good man after all." / "No. I'm not. But I'm fast."
- "I'm Royce."
Conclusion
Royce was an American mercenary who was taken from Africa after killing a rebel leader for a government he despised, and who woke up falling over the Game Preserve Planet. He worked out the rules of the hunt, used the other prisoners to learn about the hunters, freed a captive Predator in exchange for a ship, and then gave up that ship to go back for Isabelle. With mud and fire he killed the Berserker, and only then did he tell Isabelle his name. After months alone on the preserve, he returned to Isabelle, killed a four-armed Predator with her help, accepted the hunters' armor, opened two ships, sent Isabelle home, and flew off alone to meet the hunters, and nothing more is known of him.
Appearances
- Predators #1-4, "A Predatory Life" by David Lapham (Dark Horse Comics, 2010)
- Predators (2010)
- Predators: Preserve the Game by David Lapham (Dark Horse Comics, 2010)
- Predators film adaptation by Paul Tobin and Victor Drujiniu (Dark Horse Comics, 2010)
- Predators: The Chosen (2010), a short character featurette on the Predators Blu-ray
- Predators (Gameloft, 2010), mobile platformer with Royce as the playable character
- Predators (Angry Mob Games, 2010), iOS and Android game with Royce as a target for the player's Predator
- Predator: Hunting Grounds (2020), mentioned in the Isabelle tapes added in 2021
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Predator Hunt Survivors
