Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 is getting the TV treatment with HBO’s upcoming live-action sequel series. Helmed by Chernobyl and The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin, Larian Studios is not directly involved in the TV show’s creation.
Right now, little is known about the upcoming TV show, although its creation has already drawn the ire of some fans. Speaking to FRVR, Baldur’s Gate 3 star Neil Newbon, the actor behind the vampire party member Astarion, explained that those upset by the show’s existence should calm down, especially as the series is currently years away.
In the years since BG3’s release, Astarion has jumped from being a game-only character to existing in official D&D adventure books, a friendly face on Magic the Gathering cards, and will undoubtedly be a major part of the upcoming TV show. “It’s really nice to see Astarion popping up left, right, and centre,” he said. “I’d love to keep playing him if I could. He’s not one of those characters that I’ve sort of [gone], ‘great, done my job, done’. He is something that’s still very much exciting to me.”
With Astarion more-than-likely coming back for the HBO show, Newbon explained that he hopes fans give the creatives working on the series a chance. “I really hope people give them space to make the show that they want to make,” he said. “It’s really important that artistic endeavours are left to cook. What they’ll do with it, who knows? But he’s [showrunner Craig Mazin] an amazing writer. I think he’s a great showrunner as well. I think Chernobyl is a great example of how good his writing is, man.”
“You have to see that this is the vision of people of the best story they can do with the material that they have.”
Neil Newbon on HBO’s Baldur’s Gate 3 TV series
Newbon explained that, “if they do it right, then I think it’ll be a fantastic TV series”, but the team needs to be given the space to express their interpretation on this world. “Let them cook, man. Let them do their thing and enjoy it,” he said. “I think the worry about the internet at the moment, sometimes, is that people really pile on a lot, and they really get worried and upset. And I understand that comes from a place of love, often they’re very worried about things, but nothing’s happened yet, you know what I mean?”
The actor explained that, for fans, “it’s healthier to watch the thing and then have a reaction to it”, adding that “sometimes people get very affected by stuff they don’t know”. This happens a lot with adaptations; whether it’s book-to-film or game-to-show, there’s a devout focus on purity which often can’t be translated one-to-one.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Newbon said. “Unless you’re filming a theatre piece, you can’t do a one-to-one from theatre to film, we’ve seen that. You know, Les Misérables, Dangerous Liaisons, is a good example—that was a theatre piece, it went into film, both are equally good. The can all be good… but they’re different mediums.”
The actor explained that it’s particularly different when translating games to film, or vice versa, as the mediums require something different from the user. “TV, film, theatre, most theatre (some theatre is actually promenade) but most of that is passive medium viewing the vision of the director. Games are active. You are involved directly in the story. It’s a completely different medium. And I think people should understand that, I think, I hope they do, that’s it’s a different thing.”
When it comes to adaptations of games to film and TV, or any adaptation, including Baldur’s Gate 3, Newbon hopes fans can understand why not everything survives the translation of adaptation. “That’s why it has to be treated in a different way,” he said. “You have to see that this is the vision of people of the best story they can do with the material that they have. This is a game, and if you take a film that goes into a game adaptation, same thing, right? For a long time, it was not easy to translate because people would try to translate the film into a game as opposed to making the game itself.”
Newbon himself has been involved in a film adaptation of a novel that made changes to the source material: The Discovery of Heaven. “The book was crazy popular in Europe,” he recalled. “When we came to the interview with Harry Mulisch, the author of that book, and a book called The Assault which was also very famous, they said: ‘Are you worried about them adapting your work?’ And he said: ‘When I was alone writing The Assault and writing this book, nobody was looking over my shoulder telling me how I should adapt it from my brain into the book’.
“So, I guess his point was, what he said was, ‘I don’t want to be telling them how to adapt my book into their film’. I think that’s important to understand, that they are different mediums and that it’s [Baldur’s Gate 3] is an adaptation, it is a continuation of a story, but it has to be in the format of a television series. It can’t be interactive because it’s not a game.”
At the time of publication, there is no release date on Mazin’s Badur’s Gate 3 series. Likely slated to release after The Last of Us Season 3, the show is years away at this point. As a continuation of the series, it will be different, it will have its own flavour, but it’s worth seeing what the team working on the show manage to cook up.
