BG3 Showrunner Craig Mazin Confirms Game Cast Should Appear in the Series

Source: GDC | Published: 2026-07-31T14:23:57Z

Craig Mazin says the core Baldur's Gate 3 cast should appear in the TV adaptation in meaningful ways, whether reprising familiar roles or playing entirely new characters.

From Short Horror Games to BAFTA — Here's How That Path Actually Worked

Samantha didn't take a straight road to becoming the first games performer selected for BAFTA Breakthrough.

She started with The Excavation of Hob's Barrow — a cozy Victorian horror game with a niche audience. Her performance landed on the BAFTA longlist that year, going up against God of War. That's when it clicked: someone had noticed a game almost nobody played. "Maybe I'm actually good at this."

She looked up the BAFTA Breakthrough eligibility rules. For film and TV, you needed to be a series lead — something she'd never managed. But she found a loophole: she'd played a lead in a game. So she submitted under Hob's Barrow. Baldur's Gate 3 was still under NDA at the time; she couldn't even acknowledge it existed.

She got in. Then she became a BAFTA juror herself, helping select the next round of games nominees. "I turned all those other performers into monsters — they'll be self-nominating forever now. If that's my legacy, I'm fine with it."

Craig Mazin and the "Prepared Statement"

On the question of a Baldur's Gate 3 TV adaptation, Samantha didn't hedge. She mentioned she'd gotten to know Craig Mazin — writer of Chernobyl and The Last of Us — through BAFTA Breakthrough. She's a devoted fan of his work. He's not opposed to casting performers who came up through games.

Then she said: "I don't want to misspeak because I will be quoted. So I have prepared a statement, direct from Craig himself, which I will now read aloud."

And she read it: "Craig Mazin has personally expressed to me that he believes the core cast of Baldur's Gate 3 should appear in the show in some meaningful way, whether in familiar roles or entirely new ones."

She added one caveat: Mazin is currently deep in The Last of Us Season 3, and the adaptation hasn't entered pre-production. The story is set after the game's events, so there are no awkward continuity constraints on casting. As for whether Karlach is the lead — she said only "obviously Karlach is the lead," and left it there.

260 Hours of Motion Capture, Line by Line

Most people know Samantha voiced Karlach. What she made a point of clarifying: she also did full motion capture — 260 hours of it.

The number is that large because games can't capture motion in continuous takes. Everything is shot line by line and assembled in post. Add to that: performers were coming out of pandemic isolation and running into close friends on set — everyone in unflattering mocap suits, trying to catch up, trying to stay on task.

The Gortash battle scene is a specific example. It has a companion version and an origin version — the latter required Karlach to play both sides of the confrontation alone, talking to herself. Both versions were recorded in the same day, organized by theme rather than narrative chronology.

The Gap Between Actors and Development Teams Is Still Wide

One of Samantha's current projects is Fading Echo, from former Blizzard developers and the Critical Role team. No NDA on this one — "no confidentiality agreement, ask me anything, I just won't spoil the story."

That openness meant she got an hour with the narrative designers before recording — learning the game's universe, understanding that the game represents only 5% of the world they've built. She also spent an hour with the lead animator, watching how the character actually moves. "She's a bit like Luffy from One Piece meets Björk — very elastic, very strange." That hour reframed how she approached the role. She didn't have to walk into the booth wondering what her character looks like, how she moves, whether she even likes the world she inhabits.

Her read on the industry is blunt: games sometimes treat actors like outsourced plugins — plug them in, unplug them, job done. That's a waste, because performers are free marketing. She's actively talking about Fading Echo precisely because the project treated her as a collaborator, not a vendor.

Her advice to developers: bring performers in before recording, run table reads, run chemistry tests. The cost is nearly zero. You'll find out early if two actors don't belong together — instead of discovering it after the pipeline is already locked.

Actors Who Don't Respect the Medium — That's a Real Problem

Samantha has an observation about performers entering games that doesn't spare anyone's feelings.

There's a recurring story in the industry, she said, and every actor in the space has lived some version of it: they get a call before a games awards ceremony. Someone asks, "Are you the lead of a certain game series?" The actor replies, "Oh, I think I recorded a lot of sessions." The caller says, "Right — you're the main villain. Everyone's talking about you."

That kind of indifference doesn't exist anywhere else in performance. You can't walk into a Royal Shakespeare Company audition and say "I hear Shakespeare would be good for my career, but I'm not really interested — just tell me what you need" and expect to ever be called back. In games, somehow, that's acceptable.

She recommends a book: Julia Bianco Schoeffling's The Art and Business of Acting for Video Games. The first page asks: are you an actor? If not, go become one, then come back — that part is the most important. Everything about games-specific technique comes after. Including the reality that because of NDAs, you might not find out you're doing full-body mocap until you actually step on set.

A Game About AI Relationships — Arriving Faster Than You'd Expect

Samantha mentioned an upcoming project: Limerence, an ultra-low-budget indie. Players find a device and piece together the life of a woman named Claire through her Instagram, WhatsApp, bank records, and messages. The game reads the player's emotional state and recommends music accordingly — "because you're sad, so you might like this." Claire has formed a relationship with an AI.

"This isn't speculative sci-fi. This is something that's happening." They've been developing it for two years. Every time they thought they were ahead of the curve, reality caught up.

The performance itself is nothing like conventional dramatic acting. It's voyeuristic, interior — not lines meant to be delivered, but conversations meant to be overheard.

Samantha has played Star Wars: The Old Republic villains, played a hero like Karlach, and now she's doing a role with almost no conventional dramatic range but an unmistakably contemporary texture. "This medium has given me roles I would never get on screen. I'm going to keep doing it until they drag me off the lot."