Neil Newbon Has Been Turning Down Every Role Written as Another Astarion

Neil Newbon voiced Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3, a role that made him one of the most recognisable video game performers of the past several years. The high-pitched, trauma-laden vampire companion drew enough attention that Newbon has since been approached repeatedly to play characters explicitly described to him as "just like Astarion." He has turned most of them down.

In an interview with FRVR, Newbon credited the decision-making framework directly to David Bowie. He named Bowie and Iggy Pop as early childhood influences and described Bowie as a performer who completely reinvented himself throughout his career rather than settling into a familiar mode. The lesson he extracted from Bowie's interviews was concrete: extreme repetition breeds stagnation.

"Yes, I think there's definitely a Bowie rhythm in me. I'd love to play him in Labyrinth or love to do a biopic of him," he said, adding that he would "definitely play Jareth in Labyrinth if someone came at me with that."

— Neil Newbon

Newbon argued that Bowie understood productive discomfort — that pushing into unfamiliar territory, even when results fail, keeps a performer from calcifying around a single register. Staying in that slight unease, he said, is where serious artistic work actually happens.

"I always liked that about him as an artist, that he was constantly trying out new things. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't."

— Neil Newbon

The pressure to replicate Astarion has arrived in concrete form. Producers have pitched Newbon on roles framed as near-identical to his BG3 performance. He told FRVR the quality of those projects wasn't the issue.

"I've definitely avoided a few roles recently not because they were bad projects or anything, just because they, for me, the character — they kinda want the Astarion thing. And it was just like, 'Well, I don't really want to do that again. It's too close to the character I've already done, I don't think I could offer anything necessarily that's interesting to this particular character.'"

— Neil Newbon

Newbon was careful to separate vocal similarity from character similarity. A comparable register in the booth isn't the disqualifier on its own. What he's resisting is a character whose arc and psychology already belong to Astarion — a role where someone expects the same performance repackaged.

I think the Bowie framework is doing real structural work in this interview rather than functioning as name-dropping — it's the operational filter Newbon applies when a script arrives, not a retrospective justification for choices he'd make anyway.

The work he has taken since Baldur's Gate 3 runs in the opposite direction. He voiced the AI Darius in Bungie's Marathon, a role noted for its theatrical, Shakespearean register despite limited screen time. He played Drysdale, a sentient and dateable drying machine, in Date Everything!, Lumacchio in the Lies of P DLC, and main character Chase Lowry in Dead Take. None of those shares genre, tone, or internal character logic with Astarion.

Newbon said he would return to Astarion in an official capacity if the opportunity came up. That prospect may exist. Last month, HBO announced it was developing a Baldur's Gate 3 television series continuing the story from where the game ends. Whether Newbon is attached to that project has not been confirmed.

Larian Studios has already moved on from the Forgotten Realms setting and is now developing a project under its own Divinity IP, with no release timeline announced. Newbon said he would love to work with Larian again, though no connection to the upcoming project has been established.

I see an actor running a coherent career filter — not avoiding typecasting as a general principle, but declining specific jobs because the character on the page is already a known quantity he has finished building.