Raised by Wolves’ Abubakar Salim goes all in with tabletop role-play

polygon.com:

After wrapping a long day on location in South Africa during the filming of HBO’s second season of Raised by Wolves, Abubakar Salim, who plays Father on the series, was invited out by the rest of the cast for a night on the town. But he had other plans — participating in his weekly session of the tabletop role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade broadcast live online.

Initially his castmates were a bit confused by his hobby of actual play, that is broadcasting full-length tabletop role-playing games online in sessions that can go on for three or four hours at a time. But before long, the other actors working on Raised by Wolves became engrossed with his double life spent playing make believe with his friends.

“They got really interested in it,” Salim told Polygon in an interview earlier this month. “They wanted to get into it, and I think there was this sense of [discovery]. We had the space to kind of go into this and dive into this.”

Now Salim is taking his talent for tabletop role-playing games in a different direction. Instead of a bloodsucking ghoul, he’s taking on the role of a powerful, violent enforcer named Valkos, an unholy weapon covered in ritual scars and tattoos, and generally not someone to be trifled with. He’s part of the cast of Haunted City, a new series based on John Harper’s Blades in the Dark and broadcast on The Glass Cannon Network.

For Salim, he’s not playing games on Twitch for exposure. Instead, he’s there because he loves it.

“I’d be an idiot to miss it,” Salim said. “It’s this purest form of storytelling, and purest form of actually going into a world and losing yourself in a world. And I think it’s so funny, especially when I’m used to being on set where you have all the costumes and