Baldur’s Gate 3 Dark Urge actor Neil Roberts: “It’s pretty Shakespeare”

Neil Roberts is a big personality in the world of acting. He is an accomplished soap opera actor in Britain, a villain in the classic series Charmeda performer in countless radio plays and a stage actor, and he has appeared in many things for over three decades – including an early Marvel film called ” Nick Fury: Agent of Shield, alongside Germany’s favorite importer David Hasselhoff.

You may not know that he also appears as a voice actor in several video games, including Baldur’s Gate 3. While you’ve probably heard a lot of Roberts’ work, you might not even realize it’s him. That’s because he’s one of the custom voices you can choose during character creation, specifically Tav 5. He’s also the main voice of the tormented Dark Urge, a character that some players believe is the best possible origin choice, as they play Larian Studios’ wildly popular role. Playing game.

How does a classically trained actor from the Old Vic Theater School end up talking about chopping hands and gleefully kicking squirrels? According to Roberts, voice acting in games wasn’t even that much of a challenge, having spent time early in his career making radio plays for the BBC alongside the likes of Brian Blessed and Judi Dench.

Photo: Neil Roberts

“I did three or four radio plays a week for months, so I did over 100 over the course of a year, including trying to play 60-year-old pirates in my early 20s,” Roberts said.

During a video call, Roberts described this time to me, telling me how his first experiences in front of a microphone were filled with a confidence that he doesn’t feel when working with other people because the air is dead when you stay with your own Reading lines. “As an actor, there’s nothing worse than being unsure, with all that chatter in the back of your mind while you’re trying to get into something; it was terrible.”

However, he kept getting invited to these radio plays, even though he had done so many of them that they were all a blur, so he must have been doing something right. During this time he learned a lot, including how to read and act more or less on the spot. Unlike film, television, or theater, radio doesn’t leave time to learn lines, especially if you’re doing multiple recordings a week. This ability translated well to voice acting in video games Baldur’s Gate 3 especially in which Roberts practically had to play three characters.

One might imagine that Tav, the main custom character, is just a character, but that’s not really the case. To reflect the choices you can make, the actors portraying your individual character must not only speak it as Tav, albeit with different undertones, but also as an illithid version of Tav. Plus, they do it more or less alone, with no other actors around.

“I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that everything is very isolated,” Roberts said. “You’re alone in a room, in your little onesie, glowing balls everywhere and special gloves with chips to detect your hand movements and cameras everywhere recording your every move. This means you have the screen in front of you and your dialogue. But you literally have to use your imagination, which again goes back to radio.”

Image: Larian Studios

Neil needed a lot of imagination in his role as Tav because Tav is not a character as such. We define who they are as we play them, so all the Tav actors had to be everything at once, not to mention recording three versions of multiple lines and also doing the motion capture for each of those three. Of including each potential version of each line, Roberts said: “So you would probably do something similar. But it didn’t have to be the same. Right? Of course, as long as it fit the line, it didn’t have to fit with anything. But it’s quite liberating in that way.”

Roberts mentioned that he suffers from ADHD, although he only recently managed to get a proper diagnosis. Given Tav’s nature, I asked if he felt like his ADHD actually helped him switch between the three states of being and the various disjointed lines the main character has to say.

“I have close relatives who constantly think about their ADHD and how it may or may not affect them,” he said. “And I think I didn’t, whether because of my age or just because I didn’t.” He then explained that he spent a lot of time trying to figure out what his ADHD was and what his personality was but ultimately came to the conclusion that it was all related to his ADHD because it was just his neurology. “Well, I imagine it probably helped.”

Regarding the differences between the Tavs, Roberts mentioned something that I wasn’t aware of. When I choose a voice, I tend to just choose the one that I think fits the visual side of the character I’m creating. However, the Tavs had different guiding ideas that helped them implement it: “We had an essence that I don’t think is allowed to talk about, but it is not described in the game itself. So my nature was a villain.”

If you’ve built a Tav that’s a rogue and noticed that it uses the fifth voice option, then congratulations, you’ve customized the voice exactly as intended. The fact that Roberts was a villain may have contributed to him ultimately being the default voice for the game’s only customizable origin character: the Dark Urge.

While every Tav actor sings “Dark Urge” lines, only Roberts’ voice is used for the incredible monologue the character delivers when the player hears her backstory during character creation. This makes his portrayal the default portrayal of the pale Dragonborn – and it turns out that’s the intended option, as Baudelaire Welch, a senior narrative designer at Larian, actually had Roberts in mind for that voice.

At Baldur’s Gate 3a single author would be responsible for one or two specific characters for all lines. Baudelaire was responsible for “Dark Urge” and specifically chose Roberts as the standard voice. Of course Roberts was flattered, but that also means he took part Baldur’s Gate 3 is much larger than some people realize – especially given some fans’ belief that Dark Urge is the canonical choice for the game given all the additional scenes and interactions.

Image: Larian Studios

Roberts hasn’t made it far into the game yet, but I asked what he thought of all the positive fan reaction to Dark Urge specifically. “I’m excited to be part of a great and popular game, but also part of something that people believe is canon.” Larian recently released numbers showing that 94% of players chose a custom character have, which shocked Roberts. He assumed more people would choose an Origin character because that’s exactly what he would do. “I had no idea of ​​the impact of my voice in this game, of this Dark Urge monologue, [or] of anything, really, because I’ve never seen anything broken before.”

The monologue is an important part of the production design for “Dark Urge”. “A lot of people refer to this monologue as Shakespeare,” Roberts said. “It’s probably just me exaggerating, but I think it’s because of this dilemma. And there’s a lot of Shakespeare in it that goes back and forth. But it’s a real pain. You imagine you don’t know exactly where you’re coming from and what pain that means, but there’s this overwhelming feeling of something that you then have to fight. And I think it’s confusion and almost like a child doesn’t know exactly what to do. And so we got into it.”

There’s also the nature of the Dark Urge: a custom class with a constantly grasping evil at the forefront of their minds. It’s a character choice that not only offers the most heinous things you can do in the game, but also actively encourages them, sometimes taking the decision completely out of your hands. “It sounds really pretentious, but it’s all human emotions and parts of us that we can let out sometimes within a game,” Roberts said. “It’s a safe environment; We can do this without hurting anyone. Even if the things the Dark Urge does are in a far more extreme form.”