Baldur's Gate 3 Astarion actor says he "physically, mentally just shut down" while working on the RPG and "other projects simultaneously" – "I don't know what you're asking me to do"

Neil Newbon, the actor behind Baldur's Gate 3's devilishly handsome vampire spawn Astarion, had to take a rare break from shooting the sprawling 2023 RPG because of burnout.

During an enlightening conversation between Newbon and Final Fantasy 16 Clive Rosfield actor Ben Starr (timestamp), Newbon said he's only experienced burnout a few times in his long and storied acting career: one was in Japan for a project he can't yet talk about, and the other was Baldur's Gate 3.

Thankfully, Newbon made it pretty clear that his long hours working on Baldur's Gate 3 were on his own terms, and they never veered into "abusive" territory, but it was enough that he had to take a break for the sake of his mental health.

"I've had burnout where I physically, mentally just shut down," Newbon said. "That was during Baldur's Gate, we were working so hard. I was on other projects simultaneously. We were doing crazy hours. Not abusive hours at all, we were all up for it, but it was very long hours, very long days because it was so much to get through, and great work.

"But one day I walked in and I mentally shut down. I just stood there going, 'I don't know what you're asking me to do. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what to do physically. I just shut down and I had to stop. It was the one of the few times I've ever stopped my own performance and then asked to stop the shoot because I physically couldn't carry on."

Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios, which is independently owned, has a sterling reputation not only for developing genre-defining RPGs, but also for treating its developers like human beings and assuring a healthy work-life balance. And true to form, Newbon said it was the folks at Larian who first insisted he take some time off from shooting Baldur's Gate 3.

"And they said, 'Uh, OK, you need to take, like, a week off.' And I said, 'I'll be back in two days.' It was like, 'You're going to take a couple more days than two.' So, after a couple days, I felt better, snapped out of it, rested, and then came back into it."

Starr also admitted to having "a couple of moments on Final Fantasy where I was absolutely done," adding that he felt frustrated "about me not being able to deliver something, because at the end of the day, this is art, but it's an art that is also a product that we need to do."

Baldur's Gate 3 mocap actors were so dedicated to the RPG's romance that they really kissed, so Larian had to make sure nothing too garlicky was nearby: "We were very careful at lunches"