It's impossible to imagine what Baldur's Gate 3 would be like without Astarion actor Neil Newbon there to keep things admirably sleazy, but if Newbon had kept working with his former agents, he may never have gotten the chance to drink your blood and be sexy.
"I've had agents turn down three-week mocap gigs that I didn't even know about," Newbon tells Entertainment Weekly in its new interview with members of the "Pixel Pack," some of the gaming industry's most prominent actors.
"They just didn't want me to do it," Newbon continues, "which is not cool. But this was a long time ago. I got rid of those agents."
Newbon began his career performing relatively small roles in traditional acting spaces – theater, TV shows on the Discovery Channel – before starting to build his now 15 years of experience doing motion capture and voice work for games.
Giving life and movement to characters in titles like Detroit: Become Human, Resident Evil Village and, of course, Baldur's Gate 3 is what ultimately led Newbon to his current role as a fan-favorite vampire king. But Newbon tells Entertainment Weekly it was, at first, a struggle to get people to take him seriously as a video game actor.
"I had conversations about, 'That's going to look really good when we get the real actors in,'" Newbon recalls. "I was like, 'What do you mean real actors?' I'm a real actor. I went to the f***ing Edinburgh Festival, man!"
"I realized there was a disconnect between 'motion-capture artists,'" he continues, "which was the old technical term for us, and actors, which meant people still hadn't quite got the idea of what an actor could do here." But now they know.
5,000 gold, 2,500 hours, and one priceless scroll: Baldur's Gate 3 player cooks up a "Midas run" by turning the RPG's bosses into solid gold trophies, because "why not."
