Karlach’s actor knows about the 3,138 ‘filthy’ Baldur’s Gate 3 stories you’ve written on fanfic sites and still sends all her love to fans for changing her life: ‘I don’t read it, but I am aware’

One of the fun things about the eternal, universal furore around Baldur’s Gate 3 is that the game’s actors clearly love it just as much as the fans do. Dip into the BG3 category on Twitch and your odds are pretty good that one or more of the streamers you find will have voiced a major character or two.

So when PCG’s Ted Litchfield sat down for a chat with Karlach actor (Karlachtor) Samantha Béart, he obviously had to ask what it’s been like to interact with—and be part of—such a ravenous community of fans.

“Everyone’s had a unique experience,” says Béart, “and they will come and confess that to me at the con table, and tell me the decisions they made and how they will atone for those decisions in the next run.” Which is a more Catholic experience than I was expecting.

Slightly less Catholic: existing in BG3 fan circles means she’s very aware of the incredible volume of NSFW Karlach smut out there, you filthy animals. Béart knows about “all the filthy things people write about on [fanfiction site] AO3, you know, I’m aware—I don’t read it, but I am aware, because I’m a person and I am on the internet.”

Which, hey, how could you not be aware of it? A cursory search of Archive of Our Own (AKA AO3) for explicit content featuring Karlach nets me 3,137 results*. Widening the net to include all things Baldur’s Gate gets me 15,482 results. I can’t list most of the associated tags without plunging PC Gamer into an SEO hole too deep to ever escape from, but they are varied and descriptive.

So, yes, people are very into these BG3 characters. It’s a dead heat between BG3 fans and the Stellar Blade community as to who is thirstier, I’d say.

But Béart loves the fan passion (and maybe the fan passion, I can’t say) and is still kind of taken aback by the extent of it: “The fact that it wasn’t really an official marketing campaign in the way that triple-As usually get; it was never on the side of a bus or on the tube or anything, but my hairdresser—who doesn’t play, is single, no kids—knows about Baldur’s Gate.

“It’s been completely life-changing, and most of that is down to the fans. And they are fans, they’re not always players, actually: they’re fans of narrative… and they have learned a CRPG and a [D&D] 5e system because they want to experience our stories, and that is quite a compliment.”

*No word of a lie, I refreshed the search just before hitting publish and this number increased by one, to 3,178.