As one of the main villains in Baldur's Gate 3, Orin the Red is a truly malevolent archetype who seems driven purely by her own nefarious goals. Her actor Maggie Robertson is more sympathetic, however, and believes the character is as molded by what’s been absent from her life as what she’s been surrounded by.
During a chat with GamesRadar+, Robertson breaks down how she views Orin compared to the audience. "A lot of people like to just call her psychotic, but for me, she is that, but the reason why is because she is secretly a broken little thing," the actor explains.
"She's never known love, she was never taught how to love," she adds. "That's a foreign concept to her. She has no idea what that even looks or feels. The only thing she knows is violence, so of course she is the way that she is."
This, as Robertson explains, is what allows her to look at Orin as a "sweet little thing" with "empathy and compassion," since the changeling only knows brutality. It helps she "has so much fun" being completely awful, to boot.
Being a shapeshifter with a real bloodlust makes Orin a true agent of chaos. Her mimicry is powerful, but she has a tendency to abandon her disguise out of pure excitement for whatever evil she's in the midst of, giving Robertson and the narrative designers plenty of opportunities to indulge in their own darker sides.
It's ground Robertson's familiar with since, as she points out, she tends to be cast as video game antagonists, also lending her voice to Lady Dimitrescu in Resident Evil Village and Lady Nicastro in The Lamplighters League. The key to doing these characters justice, she believes, is in sympathizing with their perspective.
"It's very important you don't judge them," she asserts. "You have to be able to look at them with love in order to fully understand their whys and who they are."
