My favourite moment at the BAFTA Games Awards wasn’t any particular win, but Alix Wilton Regan encouragingBen Starr, dressed as Jimbo from Balatro, to feed Neil Newbon a banana while we filmed it all. It was only slightly less debauched than it sounds.
Wilton Regan has appeared in over 60 video games, but she’ll always be Dragon Age’s Inquisitor to me. That night though, she was there for one particularly special project for her, Tales of Kenzera: Zau. Nominated twice, it went on to win the Game Beyond Entertainment BAFTA. As the executive producer, Wilton Regan tells me that winning was “a huge honour”.
The Beauty Of The BAFTAs
Wilton Regan explains that winning Game Beyond Entertainment was especially fitting as, “that is the epitome of what Zau is as a game. It’s about confronting your grief, the loss of a parent, moving through that, moving beyond that, and out the other side. How do you process all of that as a young person? For me, it was exactly the right award at the right moment, at the right time.”
The game was a passion project for director Abubakar Salim, best known for playing Bayek in Assassin’s Creed, who based the game on his own relationship with his father. “To see his reaction when he won, it was beautiful. He was really shocked,” says Wilton Regan.
Wilton Regan respects BAFTA as an institution because it understands how important the video game industry is. As of last year,the video game industry’s value is worth $184 billion, surpassing that of the global box office and music industry combined. “The thing that no one openly admits in the gaming industry is that everyone wants to win a BAFTA Game Award because the BAFTAs, as an institution, has been going on for 75 years. For film, television, and video games, it has been going for 21 years. But it is an established, respected industry standard that holds a lot of clout.
“[BAFTA] understands that games are commercially hugely valuable to the entertainment industry. BAFTA also understands the value of good storytelling. When you think about good storytelling, video games are arguably the most immersive art form you can access. Whilst you can sit passively consuming a beautiful film or a beautiful TV series, you sit there and enjoy it, and you’re entertained, but with a video game, you are actively immersed in that world. Not only are you immersed in that world, but you are also potentially partially in control of it and its outcomes.
“The other thing that BAFTA understands is that the British video game industry is such a pool of concentrated talent. We’re a tiny island and we have some of the best actors working in video games. We have some of the best writers. We have some of the best studios. Traditionally, we have a longstanding, very respectful branch of video game studios, makers, and thinkers, including the next generation that are coming up, like Abu’s stuff and me being an executive producer on it and branching out from straight acting. I think BAFTA is being savvy about recognising video games, but I also think it’s doing them justice, which is what they deserve. I believe that video games deserve their place in the sun.”
Challenges From Above
Part of that active thinking in games means trusting actors to understand their character and shape them from the script provided - but not everyone is as open to this artistic freedom. “Sometimes it’s hard for me to convince executives or people higher up that you should trust me to play the character this way,” she says. “In their heads, it’s something else, and once you start playing it, you realise, actually, this is the way it should go.
“Something I find terrifying, which I notice, and it happens less now in 2025, but I remember quite a few moments either in the sound booth or specifically on the performance capture stage, high-level executives coming in just to watch for the day or to observe. That’s a bit scary in itself, but then talking afterwards and saying to me like, ‘We’re just worried that she’s coming across as a bit of a b*tch’, or ‘she’s being a bit aggressive’. […] Those companies had hired me to play this very, very strong woman who’s been through a lot, and then when I delivered that to them, they were like, ‘she just seems a bit aggressive’. Yeah, because she’s been through hell and back. She is a bit angry and upset about things.”
Wilton Regan says there’s been a change in the industry where people are now, “less frightened of women [being] seen as aggressive”, but interestingly, she tells me it wasn’t only men who critiqued her that way. She once had a senior female executive comment on her performance that, “‘She’s kind of a bit of a b*tch, and I just don’t think it’s right for her. Do you want to change that?’”
Fortunately, that executive was swiftly shut down. “God love him, a male director stepped up and intervened in that conversation and said, ‘Sorry, you’re interfering with my actors. I need to ask you not to do that’,” she says with a smile. “I was like, good on you, powerful male ally with a voice. Thank you for stepping up, because it was intimidating being told that by a female executive; you really start to doubt yourself. If you want to get the best from your actors, you’ve got to build up their confidence.”
Video Game Actors Should Be Treated The Same As Film Actors
The first big game Wilton Regan remembers acting in is Dragon Age: Origins, and looking back at how the industry was then in how it approached acting, she says that, “things are changing for the better in the video game industry in the way that we look at actors and respect their artistry.”
The growth has been slow, but ultimately, worthwhile. “It’s a big ship, and it takes a long time to steer. And inevitably, as happens with all art forms, it’s the independent studios that start doing things differently and steering the ship differently. And then slowly, slowly, slowly that filters up to the behemoths that will eventually steer, hopefully, in the right direction of history.”
She tells me actors used to be very overlooked, “maligned and ignored by the mainstream industry”, but points to the likes of the BAFTA Games Awards and The Game Awards in helping to change the narrative around video games and giving actors the respect they deserve, as well as improving the overall visibility of video games.
“Fans and players have always understood the value of video games [and] the value of actors in video games because video games die a death without good performance. […] Fans and players have always understood the importance of a totally fcking brilliant Inquisitor, a totally fcking brilliant Astarion, a totally f*cking brilliant Indiana Jones. The fans understand that value because they understand the emotional connection to the actors. It is about educating the people at the very top that actors are therefore worth investing in from a financial point of view, not just from an emotional point of view, from a collaborative point of view.”
Table reads, script reads, and rehearsals, just as with a theatre production, TV show, or movie, are key to this, she says..
“The relationship between the developers and the actors is paramount because when I feel trusted, when I feel valued, when I feel seen and heard, that is when I feel safest to give you my best work. That is when I can give you the tears of Sam Traynor at the end of [Mass Effect 3]. That is when I can give you the blood-curdling screams of Tezi in Amnesia Rebirth, because the team, to their credit, was saying more, ‘do what you want, what do you feel?’ They weren’t trying to shut me down. If you build people up, if you give them honey, not vinegar, we actors will give you gold, and we make magic.”
She’s quick to add that actors can only make that magic off the back of a brilliant script. “I will always say your project is only as good as your foundations, and your foundations are your script, whether that’s film, TV, stage, or video games. It starts with the script. […] Then of course you need talented animators to bring us all to life, and you need brilliant gameplay so that people are entertained in between. It is a collaboration. You do not make a video game in a vacuum. Everyone is of equal weight and equal importance, and I just want people to be treated like so.”
Character Background
When I ask how much background actors are given about the characters and storylines they’re acting out, Wilton Regan tells me that in this day and age, they are increasingly being given more information - another thing gaming has caught up to more traditional acting forms on - but that wasn’t always the case.
“We used to be told absolutely sweet f*ck all about the storylines. Jennifer Hale [Commander Shepard in Mass Effect] has spoken to this, which is you go in and give a cold reading every day for four hours, and you’ve never seen the script before. Now, if you’re lucky, you will get the script 48 hours in advance to look through, to prep and learn. If you’re performance capturing, you’ll definitely get the script in advance because you have to be completely off book, but normally you step into the booth and you give two, three, maybe four reads because you know it has to be brilliant.”
She tells me she always likes to know the overall story arc to plot things in her head, especially if it’s a big game or she’s portraying a lead character. However, in terms of how much detail she knows, sometimes that comes down to her personal choice. “With Solas, I didn’t want to know that he was the Dread Wolf because that would have ruined the surprise and heartbreak for me.”
“All the games I’m working on at the moment [Wilton Regan is the lead of the upcoming Perfect Dark], I’ve been given a lot of backstory or a bible. That’s why I think that treatment of actors in video games is getting better, which is wonderful, and we need to push that further. Greater protections for actors, greater transparency for actors – like intimacy coordinators, if you’re going to be doing a simulated sex scene on a PCAP stage, that’s not a big ask. Intimacy coordinators have been around for years on film and TV.
“Consent over recording these big sexualized scenes, not everyone’s going to be comfortable with that. We have to be told in advance of signing a contract whether or not that’s going to be in our script and required of us because someone might not feel comfortable doing that, and they should have the right to say no, or to request a body double, or to just be like sorry I’m not comfortable with making those sounds can you get someone else in to do the sex scenes.”
We Need Better Protections For Actors
Wilton Regan says that her stance on AI is “really complicated” because she believes that it should be used as a valuable tool, such as a technology to help scan and detect cancer cells in patients, but that it should never be coming in to replace actors, writers, animators, or directors in any capacity.
“I 100 percent want you to use AI to perform spinal surgery on a child if you know that that robot is going to be that much more accurate and precise than a surgeon’s hand shaking, no one’s arguing with that. But why we have to use it to push artists further out of the workplace so that a few people at the very top of the tree can get richer? Is that what we really want for the world?
“First of all, no AI is completely self-functioning: that AI model is generated from human creativity, that AI has been trained off and is emulating human creativity, but it is not a creative in its own right. Surely we want to protect human creativity, which is fundamentally a human experience. No other animal on this planet is as creative or as dynamic as humans. I think that is something we should be protecting because to me, it’s the pinnacle of what it means to be alive.”
While Wilton Regan is always hopeful to see favourable AI protections in the terms and conditions of her contracts, and has lawyers to check out the fine details for her, she’s also very aware that she’s already been in over 60 video games, and there are countless hours of her voice materials already out there.
“I hate the idea of a company being able to exploit my voice, my artistry, my work. I’m also aware that there is very little I can do to control it, up to a certain point. I think it’s really scary. It’s dishonourable that companies are wanting to take and own our faces, voices, and bodies, and they want the right to make that digital replica do and say anything they want and are arguing that they shouldn’t have to tell me about it, they shouldn’t have to pay me for it, and that I should not have any means of consenting to what they’re doing to my replica. In a post-MeToo world, that’s not just grossly unfair, it’s also bizarrely archaic.”
In her experience, the developers she works with are artists like her, those who love and appreciate video games, who know her work and have no intention of exploiting her because they value her artistry as an actor. “What we need is the bigwig companies above the developers to step up and lead the way with offering favourable AI protections to [their] artists that make them a huge amount of money.”
If the company offered full transparency, full consent, the ability to say yes or no, and if they were paying her properly, Wilton Regan says she could understand certain exceptions. The example she gives is of a company needing more barks, with barks being the shouts characters make while playing, like ‘Get out the way!’ or ‘Grenade incoming!’. If they asked for her permission to use previous samples to create the new barks while still paying her if she is too busy with another project, she says, “I could be okay with that. I appreciate that it would move development time a lot quicker. I have no issue with that.”
“All of it needs to be done with the understanding that every single human being on this planet should have the right to say no if they’re not comfortable with something. Just because you are a corporate conglomerate doesn’t give you the right to strip me of my individual humanity and my autonomy and my ability to say no to something.”
The Importance Of SAG-AFTRA And Equity
Mostly, it’s the lack of transparency from companies that’s terrifying. “Companies are saying, ‘Oh, but we’d never use it to hurt people.’ Well, if you wouldn’t, sign a contract saying so. If you’re in it for the greater good, I would love to work for you, and please sign a contract that means that I am protected as an actor. That’s what the whole video game strike is about, that’s happening in America at the moment, SAG are making the very valid point that we are currently massively overexposed and massively underprotected. Why you would want to treat your artists like that, I have no idea.”
It feels like everything is moving at such a fast pace. It wasn’t that long ago that we were ridiculing AI for its inability to replicate hands, with many scoffing at the idea that AI was a real threat to creatives, but now we’re watching AI create whole movies from simple prompts - admittedly still extremely choppy and inconsistent movies with terrible sound and no coherent plot. Yet it feels like the industry’s ability to tackle these issues isn’t moving at the same pace. There is incredible work being done worldwide to set a new standard of protection for creatives and actors, but it has yet to become the new norm.
“This is the perfect point in time to be talking about all this, because you’ve got the video game actors that are on strike with SAG-AFTRA over in the States, you’ve got the British Actors Union, which is called Equity, working hand in hand with SAG to try to protect video game actors over here in the UK, and they’ve done some fantastic work in moving that needle forward. It’s really never been done before in the UK, so I have to give a massive shout out to Equity and SAG working so hard on this.
“It’s the perfect time to have that conversation, and at the same time as we were talking about entering the golden age of video games, let’s make it big, bold, beautiful, and joyous for everyone. Don’t sh*t all over the little people actually making the games.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. The video game industry is on this strange precipice where it’s doing fantastic things and getting so much recognition, yet despite all that, internally it’s struggling. It’s suffering from layoffs, lack of funding, and we’re still fighting to get protections in place for those fundamental in creating video games. Will 2025 be the year that makes a real dent in moving forward in the right direction?
