Astarion voice actor Neil Newbon offered Fallout: London modders free work, but they accidentally left him on read for nearly 2 years
Fallout: London is truly impressive, and I say that despite the fact my opening hours with it consisted of three parts crashes to one part game. Still, it's doing a lot better now, and after a few patches the devs reckon one of the most ambitious Fallout modding projects out there should be "solid as a rock".
I wonder if it's that ambition that made the project attractive to Neil Newbon, whom you almost certainly know as Baldur's Gate 3's Astarion, when he signed on to voice a character in the mod. You'd think Team FOLON—the devs—would have been quick to snap up an actor as talented as Newbon as soon as he threw his hat in the ring, but actually, they left him on read. For over a year.
In a chat with GINX TV in a video that'll go up this Sunday, Newbon revealed that he reached out to Team FOLON a long time before he joined the project: "I'd already sent them a message like a year before. Maybe two years—it was a long time ago, saying 'hey, this sounds great. I want to be involved.'
"And they missed my message. For about that year and a half." Which, hey, I get it. Let me take a moment here to apologise to everyone I owe a reply email to—it's not you, it's me. Still, it is kind of funny that someone as talented, and whose name is now as big, as Newbon ended up relegated to the same folder that housed the devs' Tesco Clubcard offers for almost two years.
It sounds like Team FOLON only quite realised what it had on its hands after BG3's meteoric success, but Newbon was still very game. "I'm a fan of Fallout and it's a free mod, that's not an issue. I'd love to offer myself up to help."
The rest is history, and you can find Newbon in the mod today. It doesn't seem like he particularly minds falling down the back of the Team FOLON couch, either: he says the devs were "very sweet, very kind" once they got in touch. "Apparently one of the guys said [to the rest of the devs] 'oh I got this message from him ages on on Twitter, but I don't know who this guy is, you should probably get back to this guy.'"
Plus, despite BG3's success, it sounds like Newbon was still willing to work pro-bono. "I also like the fact it was a free mod. So, none of us got paid. We just did it because we wanted to do it," said the actor. "There's a danger I think when actors become successful that indie developers or double A's or whatever, they think they can't afford you, which is nonsense… because we are jobbing actors at the end of the day. It's just nice to remind people that actually we're doing it for the craft."