Neil Newbon, the award-winning actor known for portraying the vampire Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3, has said he’s avoided roles recently because they wanted a repeat performance – or thereabouts – of the same thing.
Newbon was sharing his admiration for David Bowie while speaking to FMVR, particularly about how the late singer strove to always reinvent himself. “I always liked that about him as an artist, that he was constantly trying out new things,” Newbon said. “Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn’t.”
It was in relation to this that Newbon said he’d sidestepped roles because they were too close to the character of Astarion, both from a performance standpoint – some apparently wanted the same high-pitched, suave demeanour as Astarion – and from the standpoint of the underlying character himself.
“I’ve definitely avoided a few roles recently,” he said, “not because they were bad projects or anything, just because they, for me, the character – they kinda want the Astarion thing. And it was just like, ‘Well, I don’t really want to do that again. It’s too close to the character I’ve already done, I don’t think I could offer anything necessarily that’s interesting to this particular character.'”
The ‘Baldur’s Gate 3 effect’ propelled the careers of several actors featured as companions in the game, especially Jennifer English (Shadowheart), Devora Wilde (Lae’zel), Amelia Tyler (the narrator), Samantha Beart (Karlach) and Neil Newbon. Newbon arguably led the cast – he also directed some of the performances, including Beart’s as Karlach – and was awarded Best Performance at the 2023 Game Awards, an awards ceremony that Baldur’s Gate 3 dominated. (Jennifer English would win that same award two years later for her role as Maelle in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.) But Newbon hasn’t featured in a major role since.
He seems to have appeared (I don’t see confirmation anywhere) in Crimson Desert as boss-encounter-related character Marni; he’s the AI Darius in Marathon, though he appears in only a few voice logs; and he co-starred with Ben Starr in the smaller-scale psychological horror game Dead Take. He’s the villain Kurnaz in the recently fully released Greedfall 2, and he’s appearing in the crowdfunded Starfinder game Afterlight.
However, he told FMVR that: “I’ve been doing a lot of work and all of the jobs I’ve been doing have been wildly different from that [Astarion] in terms of character work.” Perhaps there’s a role he’s worked on that we’re yet to see.
