Sally Beaumont is an actor, playwright, and games writer, and her voice has featured in titles such as Harold Halibut, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, Expelled!, and Loco Motive. Beaumont was chosen as a BAFTA Breakthrough for her acting and writing work on the point and click adventure game Old Skies, which was created by Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games.
How did you get involved with Old Skies?
Dave and I met at Adventure X in 2018, and we were really keen to work with each other. I actually auditioned for quite a lot of roles in Unavowed, and got none of them. And it was a really interesting point in our friendship where he’s like, ‘Are you okay if I turn you down?’ And I’m like, ‘I won’t be okay if you give me a role just because we’re friends’.
Then he was working on the follow-up to Unavowed, the difficult second album problem, and as a fellow writer myself, I said, ‘Why don’t you do a game jam? Just do something that doesn’t have to be a roaring success, just do something for fun’. And he said, ‘Well, do you want to do the voice acting?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, of course I do, what a silly question’. He came up with this fun idea about a time traveller who had to go back in time and deal with another time agent who’d gone rogue – and I played the time traveller, Fia.
It completely took the pressure off him to make something, and it got a fair amount of attention. And a few weeks later he said, ‘We are making Old Skies as our next project’.
That was early 2020 – she says, ominously. We had lots of meetings really early on where we were talking about: who is this person? What is this world? What is the story we want to tell with time travel? Dave has a very particular writing and development style, and when he approaches something, it’s different to how anyone else would do it.
Right through the process, I think we’ve had at least three very different storylines, but Fia has always been there, and I’ve always been attached, and I’m really grateful for that. I think it’s been cancelled twice – which is not a criticism, it’s just how game development works. And every time it was back on, I would say yes without question.
I’m also a playwright, and it’s taken me a lot of time and confidence to go, ‘Wait, can I be a game writer as well?’ And through the development process of Old Skies, I retrained as a game writer, and I’ve also been working on other projects. Then Dave was like, ‘Do you want to do some writing on Old Skies?’ So I’m responsible for the time loop in chapter four, which you will see draws on my love of farce and physical comedy.
Dave likes to call me his sounding board. When he was struggling with what to do, he could come to me and go, ‘What would Fia do in this situation?’ And I am fortunate because I’m a freelancer, so I’m working on other things and I have an outside perspective. It’s useful to have someone who’s in the project and outside of the project at the same time.
We started recording the voice acting three years ago, so we’ve been doing it in bursts, mission by mission, not necessarily in chronological order, which really suits a time travel game.
Yes, Old Skies is almost like several self-contained stories, isn’t it? Almost like a revue show.
Exactly. I sort of viewed it as being like an episodic TV show. But there’s also an overarching story that almost sneaks up on you before you realize you’re invested. I think Dave’s given a talk about this, about how the episodic nature of it meant he was able to produce a game with that level of ambition because he was able to break it down into smaller chunks.
You mentioned you wanted to do more game writing: what other projects have you been involved in?
Well, inevitably I’ve already started making my own projects, and because I’m mainly working in adventure games, one of them is almost entirely a vehicle for puns. I am who I am.
I also wrote on Venture to the Vile, which is set in a kind of fantasy Victorian world – and you can see why they brought me on. A lot of people say, ‘You speak like you’re about a hundred years old’. I’m very good at playing historical ladies and immortal gods who have awoken from their slumber. Those are my casting types.
What attracted you to acting in video games?
Like most jobbing actors, I do a wide range of things. I like to follow my interests and not be on the train tracks of what I should be doing. I want to follow what excites me and the projects that are going to make me grow as a creative. If something feels like it’s too hard for me, I’ll say yes, because I want to grow, I want to challenge myself. It makes life a little bit difficult sometimes, but it’s good.
I have all this weird, disparate experience: like I did commedia dell’arte. I used to do voiceover an awful lot for corporate stuff and commercials and things – I still do. I’m a screen actor, a theatre actor: I love doing lots and lots of different things. And being that adaptable and having that varied experience means you can drop me into a game. And even if they’re rewriting the script on the spot, which does happen a lot, I can roll with it.
I think you have to if you’re a game actor, because often you don’t even know what character you’re playing when you turn up at the studio.
Yeah, I’ve walked into sessions with no idea what I’m about to do, and you have to be creatively open and have faith in yourself. My whole ethos is I like to offer, and then they get to decide which parts they keep.
We did that a lot on Old Skies, where we would do a few takes, and then I would say, ‘Look, I’ve got an idea, it’s probably silly’. And then Dave gets to decide later whether it goes in the bin or it goes in the game – and some of them go in the game and some of them go in the bin.
What does it mean to you to be a BAFTA breakthrough?
I think because I’m a freelancer and you do everything on your own, you have to become a jack of all trades and you are the only person responsible for your career moving forward. And that’s a tremendous pressure. Being attached to BAFTA Breakthrough, aside from the incredible honour, it also just means a lot in the industry. I think it’s just amazing to have such a big organization behind me, both in terms of the stamp of approval, and also just not having to do everything on my own.
Do you think that BAFTA is good for making connections?
Yeah. I was part of BAFTA Connect just over five years ago, and the friends and colleagues that I made from that, I still work with them now, and just an incredible bunch of people.
I think with things like BAFTA Breakthrough, you don’t know who it’s going to bring into your sphere. You don’t know what opportunities will open up. It just feels like going up a level in my career.
You’ve made it.
I don’t know if I’ve made it, but it definitely feels like a big step. And just the way that BAFTA has taken care of me… I’m a disabled person, and the care that they took over my access, over COVID precautions, it really brought home to me that they really value me. They’re not tolerating me.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Discover more about the other members of the 2025 BAFTA Breakthrough games cohort: Kyle Banks, Stanley Baxton, Mark Choi, and Cara Ellison.
