Calgary Expo 2024 Neil Newbon Panel

May 1, 2024 at 8:14pm
By Jason Stettner

At the Calgary Expo 2024 there was a Neil Newbon panel at the BMO Center main stage where he went over his career. It was mostly focused on a Q&A style presentation, with lots of questions and some good answers along the way.

One of the original questions and a theme that was asked often was about dealing with people and pushing forward in life. He mentions that in the business you’ll deal with a lot of rejection. There’s a blockages book that talks about now getting in your own way. He had actually almost quit acting despite it being something he always knew he wanted to do. It was just before he found video game acting that he was going to call it a day. It allows him to have more freedom than TV/film as for example he’s playing a fish soon.

Mentioned that as an actor you don’t necessarily pick your opportunities and you make choices based on what arises but he knew there was nothing else he wanted to do but to act. He went further on being very supportive of LGBT communities and beyond with the context being really with his work alongside life that you shouldn’t listen to negative feedback.

Don’t read the social media comments, ignore them. Only your opinion in life matters. Newbon also mentioned that he gets less opportunities to go out in life and have quiet as people to recognize him more often as opposed to earlier working days.

When chatting about Astarion he mentioned that it’s quite a big change to go from that to now voicing a fish in a project. There were no references for the character, he used inspiration from his friends and various voices. He uses actors and their performances as ways to create a sort of distinct voice for roles.

Furthermore Neil was more interested in where fans want Astarion to go next should the character have more options down the road as it really isn’t up to him since he’s just performing the character. Past that he went on about the addition of they/them into Baldur’s Gate 3 and doing the math behind the cost of that addition so far into development.

Since so many hours of lines would need to be done alongside reshooting countless mocap moments. In with that, Larion as a developer really does cares and is supportive of their community of players. That about sums everything up, we have additional panel and other coverage from the show in our hub.

View our Cameron Monaghan Panel Coverage
View our Calgary Expo 2024 Hub