Gustavo Luis "Gus" Sorola III (born February 22, 1978) is a co-founder, staff member, producer, actor, and frequent voice actor for Rooster Teeth Productions' machinima series, including Red vs. Blue, The Strangerhood, and PANICS. He has also starred in many live-action roles including the Rooster Teeth Shorts, Ten Little Roosters, and Eleven Little Roosters.
A running joke in Red vs. Blue is that his character of Simmons (who insists that he is Dutch-Irish) is teased by others to be of a "Latino persuasion". This is an inside-joke towards Sorola since he is in fact of Mexican ethnicity. In addition, it has been stated that the character of Church is based partially off of him, due to supposed similar dispositions.
Sorola currently lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Esther Sorola, who has been mentioned in several comics and podcasts from the Rooster Teeth website. Sorola had a pet cat named Gary ā after whom the Season 3 character was named ā which died at the age of 20. He is also an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church and conducted the marriage ceremony of co-workers Geoff and Griffon Ramsey.
Gus was a founding member of Rooster Teeth Productions, coming from Drunkgamers with Burnie Burns and Geoff Ramsey. One of the videos produced by Drunkgamers was a live-action parody of the Apple Switch ad campaign, which featured Sorola as the main actor, and used Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy as background music, focusing on the lack of games available for the Apple Macintosh computer. He is the primary IT professional at Rooster Teeth Productions, along with Ben King. He also runs the Rooster Teeth Podcast.
Trivia[]
- A self-proclaimed Bungie Labs fan since Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete, Gus was instrumental in making Rooster Teeth fans of Halo. The future crew went to E3 2001, where Gus made them visit the Bungie booth, which featured an Halo: Combat Evolved demo with Blood Gulch multiplayer. In Burnie's words, "I was instantly hooked and bought an Xbox at launch as a result."[1]
- For most of Season 1, Gus lived in Puerto Rico and had to record Simmons' lines over the phone, forcing everyone else's audio to be processed to sound similar. In the documentary Why Weāre Here: 15 Years of Rooster Teeth Geoff Ramsey said that it's because "when most things go to work, Gus finds a way to exit the room very quietly", and thus by the fifth or sixth episode he had left Austin. Gus himself later adds that he felt that it was something he could do remotely, but once he started spending 8-10 hours working with Red vs. Blue, he decided to just move back.