How Tiny Tina got ready for her most unexpected close-up in Wonderlands

polygon.com:

Tiny Tina, the impish Borderlands NPC now better known as an unhinged Dungeon Master, is Ashly Burch’s first video game character. The actor behind Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy and co-lead of Apple TV’s Mythic Quest makes it clear her career effectively begins with the out-of-control Dungeon Master now pulling the rug from beneath Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands.

And yet, Burch says, she is still learning about the character she created with her brother Anthony a decade ago. Tina started as a pastiche of someone they both knew in high school, melded with a four-year-old “in her pterodactyl phase, where she’s kind of screaming in response to everything,” Burch said with a laugh.

“I didn’t know there was going to be that other piece to it,” she said in an interview with Polygon. That “other piece” is somewhat spoilery, but for those who played Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, the premium expansion to 2012’s Borderlands 2, that piece is also present in Wonderlands’ fourth-wall demolishing story, and it gives the tongue-in-cheek shooter some bittersweet, lump-in-the-throat depth at the end.

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[Ed. note: Spoilers for Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands and Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep follow.]

“It’s so bizarre to imagine that she could be popular enough or important enough to justify headlining her own [game],” Burch said. Not only that, a game in which she is leading A-list comedians Wanda Sykes, Andy Samberg, and Will Arnett through an off-the-rails tabletop RPG campaign. “We’ve recorded the whole game, the game is out, I’ve seen the game, I’ve played the game. But it’s still, like, hard for my brain to compute.”

Wonderlands is by definition a Borderlands spinoff; it uses the same systems, relies on the same gameplay loops, and