Two days before giving birth, Bulgarian Devora Wilde recorded her voice for the video game, which won 5 BAFTA awards

The actress, who has been living in England since she was 6 years old, first voiced in Baldur’s Gate 3

With a spaceship, the heroes crash and fall into the area of ​​Fearon. They subsequently find out that they are all infected with a parasite in their eyes, and their goal is to remove it.

Thus begins the popular video game Baldur’s Gate 3, which a week ago took home 5 statuettes of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) during the 20th video game awards ceremony. In addition to winning Video Game of the Year, Baldur’s Gate 3 also won Best Soundtrack, Best Narrative, Best Supporting Actor for Andrew Wincott, who plays the devil Raphael, and the the audience.

The Bulgarian presence in popular video production is quite stable, says Devora Wilde – the Bulgarian actress based in London, who is also part of Baldur’s Gate 3. There she voices one of the main characters – Le’zel. “Who am I? Your only chance for survival” – this is how her image is presented in the video game.

Among the Bulgarians in the production is Borislav Slavov, who received the BAFTA statuette for best video game music. He heads the team, which also includes the composer Viktor Stoyanov and maestro Georgi Andreev (famous composer, conductor and director of the folk ensemble “Filip Kutev”) as an orchestrator.

In addition to BAFTA, Baldur’s Gate 3 has also won numerous other awards, including for best role-playing game, game of the year, etc., at one of the most prestigious ceremonies for distinguishing productions in this industry – “The Game Awards” 9 (The Game Awards ) in Los Angeles.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is based on the Dungeons and Dragons universe, which was popular as a board game in the 1980s. In short, the idea of ​​the game is to remove the parasite infection from the player. “But when you go on this adventure that is Open World (from English – open world), you start walking around, doing side missions and adventures, meeting other characters. In the end, whether you achieve your goal or not is not so important. The important thing is the adventure itself”, says the actress Devora. After all, she herself is on the BAFTA Breakthrough longlist in 2022. This is a program that supports the new generation of creators in films, games and television.

They start recording the voices for the game in the summer of 2019 and end in 2023. It is divided into three parts and the first one is being released in 2020 to see how the audience will react and to see what they might need to change.

During the tapings, Devora became pregnant and was assured by the production that she could stop for a while if she didn’t feel well. But she continues to work, and two days before giving birth. “One day I come home from the recording and my water breaks, good thing it didn’t happen there in the field because they were very worried in the end. At every moan and groan from my side, they shout, ‘Is something going on?'” she recalls. Three weeks after giving birth, the actress returned to the recording of the game.

When she goes to the casting for the game, the actress has no idea what role she is appearing for – whether it will be big or small, nor how successful the game will be. Only after a year of recordings does he understand what it is about. He even starts playing it and only then realizes how complicated it is.

Many people may not know, but unlike other productions in Baldur’s Gate 3, the actors do not only record the voices of the characters, but also their very movements. “Thus, the characters became much more real, a whole image is obtained,” says Devora.

After all, this is her first voiceover role, as well as motion capture (from English – Motion Capture). “At the beginning of each session, you put on a suit that has 53 little markers on it. You go into a room with 12 cameras so that you can be caught from every angle, and you record your voice and movements,” says the actress. In the game, the characters don’t move much in space by jumping and running, but rather they are fixed to one point on the ground. Therefore, no special preparation was required for capturing the movements.

Along with the game, the team started going to many meetings with fans in different countries, at which there were also quite a few Bulgarian fans. One of those gatherings is in Phoenix, where Devorah discovers American Ranch Sauce, which she really likes. Her “obsession” with him, as she says herself, is presented in Tiktok clips where she talks a lot about the video game. So it works as a joke between her and her followers.

Recently, while she was in a supermarket in Los Angeles, and early in the morning, again looking for the sauce in question, a stranger approached her and asked her: “Excuse me, are you looking for ranch sauce?”, without the actress having mentioned anything f. The woman turned out to be a big fan of Devora and the game.

You are famous from Pleven all the way to Los Angeles, they joke about her afterwards. She was born in Pleven, but left for England at the age of 6. There he completed a BA in English Literature at the University of Warwick, then an MA in Fashion Journalism at the London College of Fashion and finally enrolled in Acting at Drama Studio London.

Wilde is her stage name. When she started acting, she was advised to change her last name because her name is very Eastern European, but she doesn’t sound like that because she has an English accent. “Back then, the industry was not so open to foreign people,” she explains.

Before devoting herself to acting, which has been her dream since she was a child, she fell into the world of fashion journalism in London. However, he compares it to the movie “The Devil Wears Prada”. At that time she was interning at a newspaper and a fashion magazine. She starts out excited that she will learn practical things, but the reality turns out to be different. During the one-month internship, the only thing she was made to do was to fold, pack and return the clothes from the photoshoots to the relevant designer. “We did this every day in a small room – you look at beautiful clothes, fold them and return them,” recalls the actress, who has been modeling for a while since she was 18. She then asked her colleague how much longer she should do this in order to start doing journalism. “More or less a year unpaid,” they answered Devora.

This is when she switched to acting. In Bulgaria, she is known for her role as Yulia Boyanova from the series “Stolen Life”. Her first appearance in a film was in the film “Full Throttle” by director Ron Howard, where Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Bruhl played. Otherwise, there are many roles in foreign productions – A Precious Life, The Dare, Little French Fish, Pandora, etc.

He also has experience as a stand-up comedian. Her first participation was on the so-called Comedy Virgins (from English – “Virgins in Comedy”) – an event for people who have never tried themselves as stand-up comedians before. “It was great, about 10 people come out for the whole evening, each one has 2-3 minutes. The audience was very strong and supportive”, says Devora. At the end, the viewers vote for who they liked the most and reward him with a small statuette, which the Bulgarian actress receives.

Most recently, the video game Dragon’s Dogma II was released, in which Devora also starred, as well as the game Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty. She has more projects coming up, but she can’t reveal what they are yet.