"I realized very quickly this was D&D": Astarion actor Neil Newbon sniffed out Baldur's Gate 3, or maybe Icewind Dale 3, and put in for 10 of the RPG's 12 races mid-Final Fantasy 16
Jul. 19, 2024“I’ll play a goblin holding a pint”
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The actor behindBaldur’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 was Dungeons & Dragons,” Newbon recalls, off the back of inquiring about the project. At the time, he wasn’t sure if it would be a new Baldur’s Gate or perhaps Icewind Dale 3, but he was into it. “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.”
It’s fair to say Newbon’s role has been one of the best in a video game over the past five years, if not 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.
Baldur’s Gate 3 devs say you still can’t make out with the “complicated” yet handsome Gortash in the RPG’s upcoming patch: “Babygurl doesn’t have time to kiss.”
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