On a dreary November afternoon in Birmingham, Amelia Tyler slips between voices. Her “party trick” is making mundane things like instruction manuals sound filthy. A more sing-song style is reserved for making jokes at her expense or impersonating rude Redditors. It’s her normal speaking voice, in which she narrated fantasy role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3, that millions of people will recognise.
Created by Belgian developer Larian Studios, Baldur’s Gate 3 is set in the world of tabletop phenomenon Dungeons & Dragons, where players’ determine their every action via dice roll. The game follows a party of adventurers on a quest to rid themselves of parasites that are slowly taking over their brains. Since launching in August, it’s become a critical and commercial hit, selling millions of copies and a popular Game Of The Year choice for many.
As The Narrator (also known as Dungeon Master), it’s Tyler’s job to describe everything the player sees and feels throughout their journey – from the gratitude on a rescued child’s face, to the thrill of a supernatural serial killer reliving last night’s murder.
“I love what we’ve managed to create with Baldur’s Gate 3 – it’s very intimate,” says Tyler from the floor of a chilly photography studio, where we’re both sat in front of a portable heater. “The image I always had [while narrating] was with my chin on the player’s shoulder, whispering in their ear and [saying] ‘look at that’, tilting their chin but never manipulating them. It was nice to experiment with that – and see how far I could push it.”
Credit: Rachel Billings for NME
Raised in Warwickshire, Tyler has been acting since she was very little. Her career started at five years old, when her actress mum “couldn’t get a babysitter” and brought her along to a voiceover shoot. She proved a natural, voicing “cute little kid” adverts until around 12 when she remembers bawling her eyes out after her first truly demanding session.
“I was brought up with a lot of expectations, [which is] the kind way of putting it,” says Tyler, who describes a difficult relationship with her mum several times during our interview. “So the thought of being dreadful at something I’d been doing for so long was heartbreaking for me.”
Though she considered running away from the challenge, Tyler decided to “knuckle down and sort this shit out,” practicing for hours every day after school. As a result, she describes her sight-reading – the ability to perform a script without going over it first – with an exaggerated chef’s kiss, and says this is how she read every line in Baldur’s Gate 3.
“If I read the entirety of Baldur’s Gate 3 before each session, it would have taken me forever, and there were a lot of tweaks on the fly,” says Tyler. “I always approach characters from what’s going on in their mind… If I can get there, I don’t have to read a script beforehand.”
Credit: Rachel Billings for NME
Much of that comes from Tyler’s academic background. In 2003, she graduated the university of Bristol with a BsC degree in experimental psychology, though she would have preferred to study acting. “I would have loved to go to drama school, but my mum was an actress and was like, ‘Don’t you dare – you go to university!”
That said, Tyler grew to love psychology. Her speciality was psychoanalysis – at the time called ‘abnormal psychology’ before it was changed to destigmatise mental illness – and would have seen her working on “some real dark stuff” by exploring the mindsets of serial killers. Though teachers urged Tyler to continue studying for a master’s degree, she worried she was only pursuing this career because other people told her to. While she contemplated her future, she took a year-long break to work in voice acting.
“I didn’t go back,” says Tyler, who has been acting ever since. She was the monstrous Siren Queen in pirate adventure Sea Of Thieves, several characters in British dystopia We Happy Few, and mysterious half-demon Malady in another Larian hit Divinity: Original Sin 2. Yet by a wide margin, Baldur’s Gate 3 is her biggest role yet.
“I’m 42 years old, and I’m done with being normal”
Tyler spent countless hours in a recording booth, and the whole thing took three and a half years. The Narrator’s lines were read in 17 different styles, to account for all the different options players have at every point. Despite its enormity, the role was a “touchstone” for Tyler during a turbulent time in her life, and became much more than a simple job. “Recording for this game saw me through some very dark times,” she says.
In 2020, Tyler’s father died after an illness, right when her career was hitting new heights. “I was caring for him at home and recording Baldur’s Gate 3 at the same time,” Tyler remembers. “It was never because Larian was pressuring me to do that. But the morning after Dad died and they took him away, I was not ready to deal with that yet. I wanted to escape. We had a recording session penciled and I went ‘Is it okay if we go ahead with this? I just need to not be me for a minute. I need to be the Dungeon Master.’”
She leans in to show us the necklace she’s wearing. A toothy silver shark, made by her dad in the ‘70s, hangs at the end of its chain. “I’m really glad that just before he got ill, he got to see the first scenes of me in Baldur’s Gate 3. He’s the one who got me into video games with Treasure Island on the Commodore 64. And then I got to show him this thing [I’d made]. I wish he’d got to play it, he would have loved that,” she says, wiping away tears. “This is kind of a love letter to my dad.”
Credit: Rachel Billings for NME
Tyler was also diagnosed with ADHD during the casting process, which helped explain behaviour that she’d sometimes struggled to understand. “I don’t think I realised how tense I was, from pretending to be normal,” Tyler admits. “I’m done with that now,”
The diagnosis gave Tyler confidence to bring more of herself to roles, and that empowerment carried into Baldur’s Gate 3. She reveals The Narrator was originally meant to talk like Jeremy Irons’ sneering villain Scar from The Lion King, “watching you fuck up and really enjoying it,” but Larian decided to go with Tyler’s own voice after being impressed by her gravitas and emotional range.
It was a good decision. For many, Tyler brings Baldur’s Gate 3 to life – a constant companion, with a deadpan observation or dry comment for every situation. “Hearing people say they couldn’t imagine anybody else in this role makes me so happy, because it means I’ve taken something that can be quite sterile to a different place that I don’t think has been explored before,” she says, beaming.
When Baldur’s Gate 3 took the gaming world by storm, Tyler’s narration proved deeply popular. Almost overnight, she became a celebrity within the gaming world. More than one million people have watched her hilarious recording booth bloopers on social media (including lines like “Chlamydia, come and get ya’ dinner!”), and she was nominated for Best Supporting Performer at the Golden Joystick Awards – the world’s biggest gaming awards show voted for by the public – though lost out to fellow Baldur’s Gate 3 star Neil Newbon for his performance as the charming vampire Astarion.
“Recording for this game saw me through some very dark times”
Tyler is happy, though not always comfortable, with the spotlight she’s found herself in. “I wasn’t expecting to get noticed. It’s quite rare for a woman to be put in a position of power [in a game] like that, and you can never quite tell how that’s going to go down with the public,” she says, referencing gaming culture’s well-documented sexism problem. “I was bracing myself when it was first announced, but everyone’s been so welcoming and supportive.”
Tyler says she sometimes feels like “a bit of a fraud” when it comes to voice acting. “I’m not a parrot. I’m not one of those people who can do a million different accents. But through the course of this game, I’ve realised that the one thing I do exceptionally well is emotional versatility. Apparently that’s quite a rare thing, so I’m really proud of it, and that so many people like it.”
So what’s next? Following the success of Baldur’s Gate 3, Tyler is frank about wanting to star in another Larian game. “I would bite their fucking arms off to work with them again,” she laughs, though she hopes to play a party member next time around.
Credit: Rachel Billings for NME
“I keep getting shit from players because Larian keeps casting me as the woman you can’t sleep with, but can’t progress the plot without,” she says, grinning. “So after edging them for two games, it’s time.”
Outside of her upcoming performance as goddess Hecate in fantasy roguelike Hades 2, Tyler’s next roles are very hush-hush. But the process of creating Baldur’s Gate 3 has given her a deeper understanding of herself, along with more self-belief. As we wrap up our interview, reluctantly leaving the portable heater, Tyler is deeply confident about her future. “I’m 42 years old, and I’m done with being normal,” she says. “Within the next couple of years, you will see me in roles I was born to play.”
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