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‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Voice Actor Neil Newbon Shares Insights On His Audition Process, Animated Shorts

Undoubtedly one of the most popular characters to come out of 2023’s RPG hit Baldur’s Gate 3 was Astarion, the silver-haired High Elf vampire spawn companion that players could encounter and recruit. Portraying the charming fellow himself was voice actor Neil Newbon, known for his roles as Elijah Kamski in Detroit: Become Human and Karl Heisenberg in Resident Evil Village.

During an interview with Collider at their New York Comic Con studio, Newbon spoke about his journey with Astarion and Baldur’s Gate 3, giving insight into his audition process for the character, and even discussed the series of animated shorts based on the game that seems to be blowing up at the moment.

The actor recalled first hearing about the then-upcoming game’s audition during his performance capture shoot in Hungary for Final Fantasy XVI. “It was a high-fantasy RPG, and I thought, okay, well, that’s definitely my cup of tea,” he explained, “I saw all the pictures of the characters, of the different races you could go up for. You’re supposed to pick three; I ended up doing 10 — I was just trying my luck.”

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Newbon was excited for sure, but his experience in the industry had taught him to step back and focus on the job at hand. “I [would have played] a goblin holding a pint of beer. I don’t care,” he joked. “It was my high elf audition that apparently sat very closely to where they wanted Astarion to be, or at least they liked the idea of it. So, after 10 different tapes, that was the one that got me in.”

Funnily enough, the Astarion players know and love didn’t originally start off as the High Elf as seen today, but was actually pitched as a Tiefling, a horned humanoid creature descended from the cross-breeding of humans and fiends like Karlach, another companion in the game.

“Originally, he was a Tiefling. I remember the first session we did there was a real-time model of the character. I then thought, well, I’m not sure how to do that because I haven’t done a Tiefling before,” Newbon recalled. “Then, very quickly it was changed to high elf because it makes more sense, and also, I think Karlach’s character had come forward at that point.”

Apart from explaining his audition process, Newbon also took the opportunity to express his excitement over the latest string of animated shorts put out by Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios on their YouTube channel. “[They’re] so good!” he exclaimed, “I can’t talk about the contract, but it was really fun. We were super excited when the first idea came about. We just thought that’s genius, it’s amazing, it’s gonna be great.”

“It also has a certain tonality to it, we were allowed to go a lot further than we ever would do in the game to sort of heighten up the characteristics of each character,” Newbon concluded, “I hope they do more of it. I’d really be up for animation and doing an animated version of [Baldur’s Gate] would be awesome.”

Baldur’s Gate 3 was released on 3 August 2023 for PC, on 6 September for the PlayStation 5 and on 7 December for Xbox Series X|S. It was a massive hit and won many Game of the Year awards, becoming the first game to clench the award in all five major video game award ceremonies. Newbon also shared in the game’s success, winning the Game Award for Best Performance for his role as Astarion.