The UK has a lot of great esports broadcast talent, but it also has a plethora of voice actors, helping to bring video games to life. Neil Newbon is one such British voice actor who has lent his voice to games such as Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (as ‘Zeon’), Resident Evil Village (as ‘Heisenberg’), Baldur’s Gate 3 (as ‘Astarion’) and many more.
Beyond this, he’s also a performance director, producer, stunt person and also streams on Twitch. Ollie Clatworthy caught up with Neil Newbon at Birmingham’s Insomnia Gaming Festival, where he was meeting fans and talking about games on the main stage. Check out the full video interview above and highlights below.
Why did you go from film and TV work to video games?
Neil Newbon: I was broke. I was doing some really cool and fun indie projects in acting. It was wonderful, but I just couldn’t pay my bills.
So, I am a gamer, I’ve been a gamer since I was like eight years old. I was a geek before it was cool. I fell in love with games, and during this bad financial period, I saw an article in PC Gamer I think it was, about voiceover work in games, and I thought I should get involved. I have a good malleable voice and acting craft.
In the corner of the page was a tiny picture about motion capture, and for me it immediately looked like television and film had met theatre and had a baby! I understood the premise of what it was, so that day I got in touch with Audio Motion saying I have experience in martial arts, weapon work, gun work, basic gymnastics, tumbling and I think I’m a good fit for this work.
They wrote back and said they had a project coming up and would like to audition me. They cast me in Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier, playing 30K. So I got to do two and a half weeks filming with them, and that was my first job in motion capture. I was super lucky I recognised the opportunity and Audio Motion took the chance on me – they gave me all this amazing work and gave me a lot of support and love.
Then I worked with Imaginarium, Centroid and elsewhere – I’ve been incredibly fortunate.
“I don’t play villains – I play people that are sometimes unshackled by moral compunction. I play people that are highly motivated and aren’t restrained by the hero need to be a good person. If you play a villain as an actor, you’re judging a character, which you can’t do.”
Neil Newbon
You’re returning as Heisenberg for the Resident Evil Village DLC, please tell us about that and other things in the pipeline like Deliver Us To Mars.
I’m lucky enough to have another bite of the cherry for Resident Evil Village. So, Heisenberg’s back, baby!
It’s the Winters’ Expansion which is coming on October 28th 2022. We did this secretly in the pandemic, we did all the DLC voice over work remotely. I came back from Japan, I was doing an animated film there, rushed back to the UK then two or three months after the pandemic hit everybody, they wanted to do DLC.
So I was like, ‘cool, let’s do it’. I have a home studio luckily, so we recorded it remotely.
“It was so much fun, it’s really silly, it’s like a Mercenaries thing so you get to play as Heisenberg and Lady D. It’s wild. You get to be Heisenberg kicking the shit out of everybody!”
Neil Newbon on Resi 8 DLC
I’m also really excited to play Baldur’s Gate 3 when it’s finished. That’s out next year. I’m in that and it’s an amazing game to play, so I’m really looking forward to that too.
Then with Deliver Us To Mars, I met KeokeN Interactive and they asked me to come on board as a performance director to work with them on performance capture. I helped out with the casting, it’s great, an amazing game, and I was invited to play one of the supporting leads, Issac Johanson, which was great.
I got to work with my old colleague Nicole Tompkins which was great, and Elise Chapel, who is stunning and it’s her first game and others. It was just a fucking awesome experience, a huge amount of content went into it and we really left our blood, sweat and tears on the floor. It’s a linear experience, like an active film, helping the major protagonist on her journey. It was stunning, I was so proud of everybody.
When you stream on Twitch, do you feel like when the chat asks you to voice a character, it’s like you’re being prodded with a stick?
Nope.
[Puts on Astarian’s voice from Baldur’s Gate 3] “Hello, my name’s Astarion! It’s not you, darling, it’s me, I have standards.”
[Normal voice] Yeah it’s great, it’s fun. I’m an entertainer, that’s my job. My private life is private, but my public working life is very public, and I’m there to entertain people.
We play heroes, scientists and doctors, but we’re not heroes, scientists and doctors, we’re entertainers.
The Twitch stuff we do, I do with Tom de Ville, an amazing Marvel and Hannibal writer, he’s an incredible writer. He and I decided to start this – cos we’re both gamers as well – to reach out to a nice community during the pandemic to stay creative and talk about the stuff we love, and to share it with people.
That’s my public work, so if people ask me to do voices, sure man, I’m an entertainer, that’s my job.
You seem like a really grateful and humble person.
Thank you. I think gratitude is important, regardless of what you do in life. It’s a good way of being a watch person over your humility and keeping your ego in check, and not having a life of expectation, not being entitled.
Life is not fair, people can choose to be fair if they choose to be. People are lucky because they work hard to get ready to be lucky. Luck is the residue of design. If you work hard, it may not work out, but at least you’re ready for the opportunity. Then if you take the opportunity, take the job, get paid for it, you have to honour ir and do it service, otherwise it’s really disrespectful, I think. You have to stay humble and grounded and remember why you’re doing this job, it’s not for fame or recognition.
This work changed my life and allowed me to be a fulfilled creative artist.
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Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
