Baldur’s Gate 3 was more than both Jennifer English and Devora Wilde bargained for. Over four years have passed since the two actors began bringing Shadowheart and Lae’zel to life in Larian Studio’s upcoming RPG, and only now are the finishing touches being put on the leading ladies they’ve been entrusted to shepherd. To mark the game’s full launch, I sat down with them both to talk powerful female characters, intimacy consultants, and about the task of embodying party members who have come to mean so much to the queer community.
“My first job in video games was Divinity Original Sin, where I played about seventy different characters,” Jennifer English tells me, who describes her experience of taking on the role of Shadowheart as a baptism by fire. “I feel very different as an actor now and have learned so much from the process. As the characters have developed and changed so much throughout the game, so have we. Our imaginations are bigger, our craft is better and that’s been a real honour. How often can you play the same character over four years?”
Devora Wilde is brutally honest about how much she underestimated the undertaking of this project, but ultimately took the years of work in her stride. “I went into this whole project very naive,” she jokes. “I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know about the different ways things could go and I was discovering everything as I went along. It was a bit of a mindfuck.”
As is often the case in voiceover and motion capture, actors will often record scenes out of order or only be given the context required to understand their lines and characters on the day of shooting. While Baldur’s Gate 3 was no exception to this rule, the production cycle and collaborative directors allowed English and Wilde to make their mark on the material, bringing Shadowheart and Lae’zel in ways that not only reflected them, but influenced in ways in which they responded to the material or even responded to early access feedback. For example, both characters are morally duplicitous in their personalities, to the point where adjustments were made to ensure they were less mean and responded to the player in kind.
“[Shadowheart] used to be a bit meaner didn’t she?” English says. “Larian is amazing at listening to fans, and it’s been a real collaborative process across all areas. It’s always listening to feedback which I think is magical, and there’s something humble about it. It isn’t all, ‘This is our game and this is how we’re going to do it!’ but it’s also for us and all the people playing it, and I think that’s very beautiful. Shadowheart started off very different, and I think that what she wants and what she needs is still the same, but John [Corcoran] has created this character who is filled with so much nuance and depth. It’s the same with Lae’zel, and what I’ve seen from later in the game there is just so much too her.”
Wilde adds: “The core of the character is the same as it always has been, but we’ve had a lot of freedom within that to add on layers as we see fit while creating the performance. It was little things we’d talk about like, ‘Would Lae’zel like this? How would Lae’zel do that?’ and it was all the tiniest little details that helped inform the character.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game with countless permutations in its ending, characters, and the world you explore. As a consequence, actors portraying even a single main character are tasked with exuding a number of different emotional reactions across their narrative arcs. It seems this required a constant method of co-operation between writers, directors, actors, and developers wanting to do the material justice in the final product. It’s a real mean feat.
“It’s a team effort,” Wilde stresses. “It’s definitely not a medium where we’re able to single ourselves out and say we made this performance. At any given point it will not only be us, but a performance director, a movement director, a mocap engineer, an audio engineer. There will be five people already in the room, and not to mention the writers we’ve not really had much interaction with, obviously except for the words that they’ve written. Now the game is finally coming to an end, we'll have a little bit of interaction with them. Even if it’s through Twitter when I’m going, ‘Hello, you’re my writer!’”
Shadowheart and Lae’zel, at least from what I’ve seen from Baldur’s Gate 3, don’t like each other very much. As characters of different races with different morals and different goals, the both of them frequently butt heads, with the player acting as a timid mediator. English and Wilde are unable to talk major spoilers, but I manage to ask if the duo ever find some common ground.
“They are quite similar in terms of how they’re both very driven, complex characters that know exactly what they want,” Wilde tells me. “They will do whatever it takes to get it, and that’s the common ground between them right now, and whether they find that later in the game is something we’ll have to find out for ourselves. I think they’re far more similar than they think in the beginning, and that’s where a lot of the tension comes from. They’re both like, ‘Oh, that person is really similar to me, so I’m immediately going to hate them.’”
English jokes about wanting to hang out with Lae’zel after a few glasses of wine at the bar, and how much of the joy of Baldur’s Gate 3 comes from seeing a variety of characters from different circumstances and backgrounds forced to interact in pursuit of a common cause. It is classic Dungeons & Dragons, although a game like this takes that much further with an adult perspective on romantic and sexual relationships that it’s unafraid to indulge in. For what is still a rarity for video games, the motion capture set also had an intimacy co-ordinator present for certain scenes to ensure all those involved felt comfortable and listened to.
“I think the writing is beautiful, and it really honours her story,” English says when touching on Shadowheart’s romantic path. “It wasn’t gross, I didn’t feel exploited in any way at all, and I felt very safe as an actor. The romance part of it is just another facet of these people that we’ve explored so many different sides of.”
RPGs like Mass Effect or Dragon Age have historically treated sex scenes or nudity as a sort of ‘win state’ for the player. While your character will develop emotions for certain NPCs, the oddly juvenile reward of a bit of rough and tumble before the final battle made it feel akin to a necessity rather than a natural development. Baldur’s Gate 3 seemingly wants to upend that cliché and pursue something more human.
“It’s never romance just for the sake of romance,” Wilde explains. “It’s running in the context of the character and it’s very specific. What Shadowheart would do in that sort of situation is so different to what Lae’zel would do. Because the writing really served that, it was really fun and exciting to film those [sex] scenes because it’s within the character, and you can have fun with it. Yes, we had intimacy co-ordinators on set, so we never felt unsafe, and we never felt pressured. There was always a conversation about the script beforehand about whether we were happy with the lines or if there was anything they could do to make us feel more comfortable. We’ve all worked together and learned new things working on this game for the past few years, and I think for it to have intimacy co-ordinators is quite groundbreaking.”
Talk about the game’s romantic representation naturally evolves into a refreshing glimpse at Baldur’s Gate 3’s expression of queerness. English mentions how she met her partner while filming for the game, and has indirectly used it as an avenue to explore her own identity. Like Dungeons & Dragons has been for decades, Larian has created an experience where you’re free to become anyone or anything that represents who you are in the real world. Or not, it’s up to you.
“You’re creating a character that is an extension of yourself,” English explains. “So for people who aren’t necessarily ready to be out or aren’t safe to be out, it’s an absolutely brilliant way to explore that side of your life in ways you can’t always in real life. I wish I had a game like this growing up. I’d write things and explore other things creatively, but there wasn’t a role-playing thing I could take part in growing up as a teenager knowing that I was queer. It’s really beautiful that we’ve created that, that we’ve created a story where people can explore any part of themselves.
“We also recorded any instance of pronouns for the player with non-binary pronouns, which is something we’re really proud of and should just be a standard for video games, frankly. This is how things should be, and I want to be a part of games that are groundbreaking and the most inclusive that they can be.”
As our conversation draws to a close, I throw one final question at the actors about what it means for a character to be considered evil, and whether Shadowheart and Lae’zel fall into that definition given their behaviour and history. For Wilde, it’s a complicated thing to answer.
“I’ve never thought of Lae’zel as an evil character,” Wilde stresses. “But I know what you’re saying in how they’re both. They can definitely be viewed as both and I think that’s exciting. I’ve always looked at her as a human being. Well, she isn’t a human being. I’ve looked at her as a creature going through all the spectrums of emotions and experiences and situations and the ways she reacts to them. And whatever those reactions might be, it is what it is. I don’t see her choices as either heroic or evil, and I think they are choices made within a specific set of circumstances, largely determined in some ways by the player, but she also has her own morals.”
English says she “could never see a character as evil” because it would require her, as an actor, to pass judgement on someone she’s yet to fully discover or inhabit. “Making that judgement would make it not real or truthful to me. In my head, Shadowheart has needs, things that she wants, she has a journey, but fundamentally does not believe she is evil, so nor do I.”