‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Star Had No Idea About the Game’s Romance Until It Was Time to Record It [Exclusive]

3 hours ago 18

Published Oct 1, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Gale of Waterdeep is rarely at a loss for words. He can explain a complicated spell, talk through a crisis, and find time to charm the person standing next to him. The actor playing him, however, had no idea just how far that charm would go when he started recording Baldur’s Gate 3. Tim Downie recently revealed that he came into the project with very little information. It was his first video game role, and even after he was cast, he had to discover Gale’s personality through the scripts he received in the studio. The work went on for months before a routine Wednesday session introduced him to a part of the game everyone else apparently assumed he knew about.

Downie did not know players could romance Gale until he arrived to record the romance scenes. At a Baldur’s Gate 3 panel with narrator Amelia Tyler at FanX Salt Lake Comic Convention moderated by Collider's Maggie Lovitt, he recalled working on the game for about a year and a half without anyone mentioning its romances. “I think a lot of people just assumed I knew,” Downie said. When he asked what he was recording that day, the answer took him by surprise. Initially, he thought “romance scenes” meant flirting. Then he learned he would be performing the scenes in a motion capture suit without another actor opposite him. Downie described the revelation as a “baptism by fire,” and that first Wednesday turned out to be only the beginning.

Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Fandom Should You Join? Harry Potter · Lord of the Rings · Star Wars · Star Trek

Eight honest questions about how you actually are: what you put on when you need cheering up, how deep you go into the things you love, what you argue about, what you keep on your shelf. Answer them and we will tell you where you belong. Four of the biggest fandoms on earth are taking new members, and they could not be more different from one another.

⚡Harry Potter(Wizarding World)

💍Lord of the Rings(Middle-earth)

⚔️Star Wars(A Galaxy Far Away)

🖖Star Trek(The Final Frontier)

FIND YOUR PEOPLE →

What do you put on when you need cheering up? Nobody is brave about this one.

AThe same thing I have watched a hundred times. BSomething long, slow and beautiful. CSomething big and loud with a great score. DOne clever episode of something hopeful.

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How deep do you go into something you love? There is no shallow end here, only different deep ends.

AI know every character and all the gossip. BI have read the appendices and studied the maps. CI have a ranked opinion on every instalment. DI want to know how the world actually works.

NEXT QUESTION →

What do you and your friends actually argue about? Every fandom has one argument it has been having for years.

AWhich one of us is which type. BWhether the adaptation got it right. CWhether the new stuff ruined the old stuff. DWhether the right thing was actually done.

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How do you feel about a room full of strangers? Every one of these comes with a very big room.

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AMost of them turn out better than expected. BThe smallest ones decide the biggest things. CAnybody can change, even very late on. DWe work it out if we keep talking.

NEXT QUESTION →

What is actually on your shelf? Look over at it before you answer.

AEverything I owned when I was twelve. BHardbacks, in order, read more than once. CFigures, posters, and a few things still boxed. DBooks about how things work, plus a model or two.

NEXT QUESTION →

What do you actually want from a story? Eight questions in, this is the one that picks your fandom.

AA place I can go back to whenever I need it. BA world complete enough to get lost in. CSomething huge I can share with everybody. DAn idea that changes how I think.

REVEAL MY FANDOM →

Membership Confirmed Your Fandom Is…

Four of the largest communities on the planet, and four completely different reasons to belong to one. Here is yours, what it would give you, and the argument you would be having within a week.

Harry Potter

You belong to the fandom that is really about comfort. Hogwarts works on people because it is a place rather than a plot, and the pull is not the wizard war so much as the corridors, the food, the weather and the sense that somebody is expecting you.

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This is the most social of the four, and the one most likely to know which type every single person in your life would be.
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The new HBO series is bringing the whole thing back one book at a time, which means the arguments are about to start all over again.

Lord of the Rings

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You like the sense that the story you are reading is only the visible part of something enormous, which is precisely how Tolkien built it.
This fandom takes adaptation seriously to a degree that other fandoms find slightly alarming, and it has good reasons for that.
Your favourite thing about the books is probably the bit that is not action at all, which is the walking, the songs and the long goodbyes.
Nobody here thinks heroism belongs to the powerful, and the whole story exists to make that argument.

Star Wars

You belong to the loudest and largest tent of the four, the one where three generations are all watching the same thing and none of them agree about any of it. That disagreement is not a flaw in this fandom, it is the main activity.

You want something you can share with absolutely everybody, from a six year old to a grandparent, and this is the only one on the list that really does that.
Nobody argues like Star Wars fans argue, and the argument has been running since roughly 1980 with no sign of resolution.
The pull here is sensory before it is narrative, since it is the sound design, the score and the look of a used and dented galaxy.
You would be first in the queue, in costume, with strong opinions and a genuinely good time.

Star Trek

You belong to the thinking fandom, the one that turns up for the argument rather than the explosion. Trek has always been a series of ethical problems in space, and the people who love it love being asked what they would have done.

You are an optimist in a way that is currently unfashionable, and this is the only major franchise still willing to say the future might be better.
The best episodes are the ones where nobody fires anything, which is a sentence that makes perfect sense to this fandom and to nobody else.
Starfleet Academy brought the franchise back to a classroom in 2026, which is appropriate, because Trek has always been a bit of a seminar.
You would want the conversation afterwards more than the episode itself, and here you will always find somebody willing to have it.

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Tim Downie Spent 12 Hours Recording Gale’s Romance Scenes

Downie returned for two more sessions, putting his total time on the scenes at roughly 12 hours. He recalled the particular awkwardness of performing intimate motion capture by himself while a sound engineer watched from the recording booth. By the end, the two had been through enough together that Downie joked they could barely make eye contact. A fire alarm made one of those days even more memorable. Downie had to leave the studio and stand outside on an East London street in his motion capture suit, drawing attention at a moment when he was already feeling exposed. It was a long way from the kind of acting job he had imagined when his agent first asked whether he wanted to try a video game.

The surprise also says something about how Baldur’s Gate 3 came together for its performers. Downie said he was not initially told the title of the game or even Gale’s name when he got the part. He spent the early sessions learning a new performance technique while piecing together the wizard’s character from dialogue, and said it took around six months before he felt he had found his footing. Players, of course, have had plenty of time to get acquainted with Gale’s romantic side. Downie told the panel that an actor friend once confessed in a voicemail that he had spent two months romancing Gale in the game. Downie still has not played through Baldur’s Gate 3 himself, but he knows what he plans to do when he finally starts: romance Gale.

Stay tuned at Collider for more.