There’s ‘an awful lot of Shakespeare’ in Baldur’s Gate 3’s Dark Urge

polygon.com:

Neil Roberts is a great many things in the world of acting. He’s an accomplished soap opera actor in the U.K., a villain in the classic series Charmed, a performer on countless radio dramas, and a stage actor, and he’s been in a lot of stuff going back over three decades — including an early Marvel film called Nick Fury: Agent of Shield, alongside Germany’s favorite import, David Hasselhoff.

You might not know that he’s also a voice actor in a few video games, including Baldur’s Gate 3. Despite how much of Roberts’ work you’ve likely heard, you might not even realize it’s him. That’s because he’s one of the custom voices you can select during character creation, specifically Tav 5. He’s also the main voice of the tortured Dark Urge, a character some players believe is the best possible origin choice when playing Larian Studios’ overwhelmingly popular role-playing game.

How does a classically trained actor from the Old Vic Theatre School find himself talking about chopping up hands and gleefully kicking squirrels? According to Roberts, voice acting in games wasn’t even that big of a stretch after spending time early in his career doing radio plays for the BBC alongside people like Brian Blessed and Judi Dench.

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

Describing this time to me over a video call, Roberts talked about how his initial experiences in front of a microphone were filled with a self-consciousness he doesn’t feel when acting alongside other people, because of the deadness of the air when you’re on your own reading lines. “There is nothing worse