The actor behind Baldur’s Gate 3‘s Astarion immediately signed up to play 10 of the 12 in-game races while partway through doing performance capture for Final Fantasy 16 – because he knew it was linked to Dungeons & Dragons.
Neil Newbon, who portrays Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3, revealed in the interview with BAFTA below that he was partway through filming performance capture in Hungary for Final Fantasy 16, when he heard about an interesting new project in the works elsewhere.
“They sent me a pack of all these different races, and I realized very quickly, this is Dungeons & Dragons,” Newbon recalls, off the back of inquiring about the project. “So I got very excited and submitted 10 of the 12 races, which I wasn’t supposed to do, but I was like ‘I’ll play anything. I don’t care, I’ll play a goblin holding a pint.”
Newbon recalls being asked to come in for a demo for a vampire character, which he assumed would be a bad guy and thus “killed off immediately.” Larian revealed the role was actually for a companion character and that it would be “probably about a year’s worth of work.”
Four years later, Baldur’s Gate 3 came out, so it’s fair to say the role overshot Larian’s expectations by some margin. Newbon also reveals that Astarion’s script “didn’t change much” throughout Baldur’s Gate 3’s development time, which is pretty shocking not just for any video game but one that took well over four years to make.
It’s fair to say Newbon’s role has been one of the best in a video game over the past five years, if the last decade or so. He was nominated for a BAFTA for ‘Performer in a Leading Role,’ which he ultimately lost out on to Nadji Jeter of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, but he did take home the award for ‘Best Performance’ in a game last year at The Game Awards.
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