The following description of Victor Coste was written by Richard Dansky, the screenwriter for Splinter Cell: Conviction and Splinter Cell: Blacklist, around the time he was writing Conviction.
"The character of Victor Coste is really the counterweight to Sam’s relationship with Anna Grimsdottir. He’s the guy who knows Sam and trusts him unreservedly for who he is, even though he hasn’t seen him in ages. Grim, on the other hand, is the one Sam has to trust but doesn’t really know. Setting up that dynamic with Sam in the middle –and getting tugged at from both sides with what he has to do –echoed the professional vs. personal struggle that Sam’s caught up in. With everything else in his world uncertain, there needed to be one thing that Sam could absolutely rely on. And that turned out to be Vic.
The other great thing about Coste is that he’s the one person in the world who knows Sam and doesn’t want anything from him. That means he can call Sam on his bullshit to his face and get away with it, because there’s no agenda there. He honestly and genuinely wants his friend to succeed, which is pretty much unlike any relationship Sam’s had in recent memory. So that allowed for some really fun character-building moments in the interplay between the two of them. I didn’t want their relationship to fall into buddy movie conventions – they’re not trying to outdo each other, and one of them isn’t a week away from retirement. Instead, you’ve got these two experienced pros who know each other, who’ve had similar lives and seen their choices come home to roost, and who really understand each other as a result.
Plus, they’re really good at shooting people. But that was sort of a given, all things considered."
