Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 is filled with amazing performers such as Jennifer English’s sublime performance as Shadowheart and Stephanie Beart’s lovable Karlach. While everyone has a favourite character from the epic RPG, the majority of players fell deeply in love with Astarion, largely due to Neil Newbon’s fantastic performance.

In Baldur’s Gate 3, Astarion Ancunín is a fancy, suave vampire with a heart of gold, but the character also has some of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the game. One scene in Act 3 in particular is so masterfully performed that it deserves an award all of its own.

Since the game’s release, actor Neil Newbon has done extraordinarily well and is continuing to grab roles. However, before becoming a killer performance motion capture artist, Newbon was struggling with debt.

Speaking in a recent Ted Talk, How Performance Capture Saved My Life, Newbon explained that focusing on performance capture—motion plus voice acting—literally saved the star from debt.

“I was in £34,000 worth of debt, living in a really ramshackled place,” says Newbon. “I found myself in a situation not only of bitterness and cynicism, but also envy of my peers that were doing fantastically well. Things were going really bad,” he said. (Thanks, The Gamer.)

“I’m standing in my room, looking out of a window, two bank letters in my hand, a magazine in the other. The bank letter says, ‘We’re going to sue you if you don’t pay up, and we’re going to bankrupt you, and it’s going to be horrible.’ But also, the second letter is a helpful consolidation loan by the same bank with a high interest.”

Newbon explained that he was flicking through an issue of PC Gamer and learned about motion capture in an article about Tomb Raider star Keeley Hawes and decided to follow that route of acting instead, but “nobody believed it in”.

“Ex-friends, ex-lovers, ex-agents, even some family members. They just thought this was a bad idea. But my gut instinct, which I’d lost a long time ago, came back and told me this is the way forward,” the actor said.

Through performance capture, Newbon not only found his role as Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3, but other games before that. The actor played two characters, Elijah Kamski and Gavin Reed, in Detroit: Become Human, as well as Nicholai in Resident Evil 3 and Karl Heisenberg in Resident Evil Village.

While the actor does still do voice-only performances, jumping into performance capture just as the industry was making the technology standard, allowed the actor to actually make a dent. Now, Neil Newbon is hot talent, and almost everyone wants a piece.