Firezide Chat with Ben Starr

Yes.

Do you enjoy that?

Yeah. I don't know if I prefer it.

It's just different.

It's more like theatre than TV, isn't it?

I'm going to be controversial. I don't think it's like theatre. I don't think it's like TV either. It's an entirely different thing.

In theatre you're playing to the back of the room. In TV you're playing to the camera. In games you're doing neither.

It's much more intimate, yet at the same time completely fake.

I think people try to explain it using theatre and film because those are the things we understand.

But performance capture is its own discipline. In a volume, the camera doesn't really exist. The camera can be anywhere. It's a digital camera that gets placed afterwards. You're just playing the honesty of the moment.

At the same time, there are technical limitations. You have camera frustums, you can't get too close to another actor.

I'm fascinated to do more of it and see where the rabbit hole goes. It's still relatively new to me. There are people who've done a lot more.

I love doing HMC work – head-mounted camera performance. I love going into the volume and doing something completely different. Every day can be something new. The variety is brilliant.

It can also be disorientating. Sometimes I feel like I don't have a life outside of it. But it's pretty neat.

You do need a holiday though, Ben.

I do. I really do.

I won't have one for a while because the rest of the year is kind of crazy. But I feel ludicrously fortunate.

I'll be able to look back on these years and know I made something that lasts.

I'm so proud of that.

I think the thing you've got to watch is that you take the work home with you. I bet you're running through characters and lines in your head even when you're off.

I do. I'll go home and watch videos about whatever I'm working on.

If it's a big franchise, I'll watch documentaries, read about the history, play the older games. I really immerse myself in it.

You don't have to do that, but I enjoy throwing myself into it. So yes, I definitely bring work home. My time off is also playing games.

I had the incredible one-two punch of Pragmata and Saros, and now I'm going to play LEGO Batman. Then I've got James Bond coming out.

For me, this is basically the perfect year as a player. I love 15 to 20-hour third-person action games.

We've just had Assassin's Creed as well.

I bought it immediately.

I pre-ordered it as soon as it was announced.

What did you think of Saros?

I platinumed it far too quickly. After that I moved on to South of Midnight because I'd never played it on Xbox.

I was a little disappointed with Saros’ story, honestly, but it's a good game.

I get that.

I loved the gameplay loop. It's unbelievably satisfying.

I found a ridiculous build that basically became a cheat code. I felt bad for the enemies.

When I hit a difficult boss I'd just restart the biome, put on a podcast and become ridiculously overpowered before fighting them again.

Power Generator is absolutely broken. Pair it with a Repeater Crossbow and Vacuum Bomb and you're basically carrying around a rocket launcher. Then add health regeneration whenever you deal damage and you're practically invincible.

The moment I discovered that build I thought, "Well... the game's over." That's why I platinumed it so quickly.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Bristol. I used to do loads of youth theatre stuff growing up. I always wanted to be an actor. I was one of those very lucky people who made the choice early on and went, "I want to be an actor. That's what I'm going to do."

Not really having a plan. There was no plan. I was just going to do it, and the beautiful, naïve arrogance of a young child thinking they want to be an actor just kind of ploughing into it.

The amount of people in my life who told me, "You need to have something to fall back on," which I think is a very unhelpful piece of advice for anyone who wants to follow their dreams. The "Please fall back on this, please go and do an education so you've got something to fall back on" line is actually the biggest load of shit a person can be told because, certainly in 2026, that's not the way the world works.

I think an institution wants to tell you that doing a history degree is going to somehow allow you to become more employable, when in fact life experience is probably the most important thing. It's a system that's entirely rigged against you.

I find it interesting now how school... I really liked my school. I had a fantastic education and I'm very thankful for the opportunities it gave me. But I think the system is broken, and certainly as a person who's gone into the arts, some of the most remarkable, successful people I've ever met are people who were not good at school.

I always thought that if I had children, I would want to put them through the same education system that I did. Now, on reflection, I don't necessarily think I would.

So yeah, there you go. There's me ranting about growing up.

You see actors like the actors that came out of Skins, for example. They came from working-class backgrounds. They didn't go through drama school, a lot of them, and now they're doing great.

Acting, the entertainment industry, is entirely nebulous. It's lawless. It is entirely luck-based.

The stories you're told about how an actor is "discovered"... that's an awful thing to say. You discover an actor, and therefore there really isn't a path to success.

Drama school, I was very lucky to go to a fantastic drama school – again, my education, God, it's very privileged of me to say this, was a huge driver in my ability to enter this industry. But at the same time, the practical application of those skills that I learned is not actually useful now. It's chaos. Absolute chaos.

Most kids can't afford to go to drama school. Drama school or university is completely pricing them out.

When you say that an actor has been discovered because they're good, it's not about how good you are. It's not about how hard you work. It's about being in the right place at the right time.

Many people will tell you – and I used to repeat this mantra – that the harder you work, the luckier you get. It's true. I continue to work hard in my career and do a lot of work to keep driving it forward now that I have those opportunities.

But me being interviewed by you now is a series of dominoes that started the moment I accidentally stumbled into an audition for Final Fantasy XVI. I'd been grafting away, being a relatively solid actor, for years. But it was that luck, that moment, that spark, that meant I was able to continue forward.

Obviously my life experiences up to that point, my education, my drama school training, were able to inform a lot of those choices. But really, I could have been anyone.

I know you got some advice saying, you know, have a backup plan and stuff. But where I grew up, I think if I'd gone to drama school I'd have got picked on for it. Did you ever get that?

All the time.

I think it's different now. Obviously massively different now. The landscape of how we view entertainment in general has shifted.

I don't think people want to be actors anymore. They want to be TikTok stars. They want to be social media influencers.

But there was something very challenging about masculinity and performance. Certainly in my experience, I was made to feel like it wasn't a masculine pursuit. It wasn't something that, based on the very limiting ideas we were presented with growing up, was acceptable.

People would do drama not because they wanted to, but because they wanted to meet girls. That was why people said they wanted to do it.

Whereas I just wanted people to look at me. I wanted to perform. I wanted to be a show-off.

I was one of the only guys doing it. I got on the trend early, but I think it's unfortunately probably still true that drama is not seen as a serious pursuit. Performance is not seen as a serious pursuit. The arts are not seen as a serious pursuit.

Even though in 2020, 2021 and 2022, the arts were quite literally the thing that everyone fell back on as a result of COVID.

I think it's an incredibly serious pursuit and something that we venerate hugely.

Now, because of my success, my university wants me to come back and give a talk, or my school wants me to come back and give a talk. Yet they don't actually have the infrastructure in place to support and promote that in their own students.

What sort of thing did people say to you when they were ribbing you for doing it?

There's always a baseline of homophobia around it. There's always that.

I think vulnerability is seen as weakness in some way. Emotional vulnerability. That idea of masculinity being wrapped up in reserved stoicism; an unwillingness to fail, an unwillingness to be embarrassed.

But I was so loud that it didn't really matter.

Based on my digital footprint, there's proof that I am a fool. I am the idiot. I loved it.

My whole professional persona is me taking the piss out of myself, trying to undermine myself at every point.

I'd say growing up, that was implicit in doing what I did.

But the moment I was on TV, the moment I was little Gavroche in Les Mis, it didn't matter because it was cool.

It's almost like you're a loser, you're a loser, you're a loser... then you're successful, and then you're cool. In between that, there's a lot of unknowables.

I was very fortunate, though. Was I fortunate? I think "fortunate" is probably...

I was very good at everything at school. I was very academic. I was very sporty. I hung around with the physically masculine rugby players. I was the captain of the cricket team. I played rugby for the firsts. I did all of that at school as well as being in the drama clubs.

So you couldn't really box me. What was I doing? I was doing all of it.

I think at school, kids want to define themselves. Certainly growing up, they want to define themselves.

And now look at me. It's great.

I think this conversation is turning more into a therapy session...

That's what we want.

I love it.

I love looking back and really thinking about how I was made to feel in opposition to how I felt.

I think I was always self-conscious. I was always nervous that someone would judge me for it.

But at the same time, I was just a show-off.

I liked people looking at me.

Do you think there's an aspect of acting letting you mask over those insecurities as well?

Always. Always.

I even get it now. Before I go to an event or something, there is an expectation on me to be a certain person. I still suffer from anxiety before those things, completely unfounded because everyone's very nice to me.

But I get this sense of anxiety, this feeling that I don't want to be perceived in a certain way. Then you take a breath, and suddenly I can kind of present myself.

I think that level of being able to perform, both professionally and socially, is invaluable when it comes to social masking. We all do it.

People call it code-switching. I'm very good at code-switching, but it's very interesting. I got good at it because I was code-switching all the time.

On a Wednesday and Thursday I was performing. On a Saturday and Sunday I was playing rugby. Two very different states of being. Completely different crowds.

I think I was judged in some capacity because there are expectations about the type of person you're supposed to be. The aspects of yourself that are needed are very different.

But I also think a lot of the confidence I had from performing meant that I was a really good cricket captain because I was good at being commanding. I could wear the mask of being a cricket captain. I don't think I was a particularly good captain, but I was very good at putting on that mask.

Being good on the sports field and performing are adjacent, if not the same. I don't think in my therapy sessions I've really tried to unpack what that is yet.

As I said, some of my great friends and colleagues fucking hated school. Absolutely hated it. Some of the most talented people I know, who I hold in such high regard, hated their education.

It wasn't until they were able to break the shackles of an education system that didn't really understand them that they were able to be successful.

Depends what school you go to as well, right?

Yeah.

I went to a rough as fuck school, and a lot of people do. Even the work I do now, I didn't see it as something that was open to me when I was younger, so I just did normal jobs for a long time before I realised I could actually write.

Yeah.

I feel like part of the luck you had was just knowing straight away that it was open to you, if that makes sense.

Yeah, and the support of my family.

My parents were incredible in supporting the things that I wanted to do.

I feel like I've come in and kind of slagged off the education system, but the school itself, the institution I was a part of, was very supportive of my other pursuits. They allowed me to do other things. They enlarged my world.

But I still think there's something impossible to get rid of in the insidious nature of the message: "You need something to fall back on."

Education is there to make us all the same, right? Really.

Yes. Yeah.

To codify your future, you know. If you do English, what are you going to do with an English degree? I don't know.

There's this idea that you'll become a doctor, or a lawyer, or some defined thing.

I think about this a lot. Humanity can only predict what it already knows. It can't predict the unknowable. You can't stare into some Lovecraftian cosmic entity and comprehend something you have no understanding of.

So when people ask, "What are you going to be in the future?" you can't actually see into the future. You say, "I want to be a doctor," because that's something you've seen. "I want to be a train driver," because you've seen that.

Then people end up doing jobs they could never have imagined because they didn't even know they existed.

We're told there are these rigid structures. Doctor. Vet. Lawyer.

Don't be any of them.

You just look at the things that make money at that age, don't you? You're like, "I want to do the thing that gets me some money."

God, the amount of people I was at university with who ended up working for KPMG or Deloitte because they didn't know what they wanted to do, but at the age of 20 they were offered £45,000 a year plus a £10,000 handshake, and they could go to Barbados before they started. That's what they now do because that's what they were presented with.

I have this crazy life where I went, "No, I'm going to live this very dangerous lifestyle."

No guaranteed income. A constant sense of, "I'll never work again."

I have not future-proofed my life at all. I've lived in a constant state of potential freefall.

I can relate to that with games. I love it though.

I love it.

What I've realised is that the further you get away from ground zero, the moment I graduated university, the less I understand my colleagues who took that more traditional route.

It's been over 15 years since I graduated, and I don't understand the way they think because my worldview, certainly financially, has shifted massively.

I only know insecurity. I only know having some money for a while and then no money for ages.

They're like, "I've got my salary, and I don't want to take a redundancy package because what if I don't find another job for eight months?"

And I'm like, "Fuck... you probably will."

I know how to live off no money because I've done that.

If you've only known security, you've built your entire life around economic structures that support that.

Whereas I'm just like, if I have to be lean, I have to be lean. If I get some money, I'm going to splurge it on unnecessary dinners and Deliveroo because I can.

It's fascinating now. A lot of my friends from that time are making career choices where they go, "I no longer want to do the job I fell into when I was 21. I want to move."

And I'm going, "Just fucking quit. Just fucking quit. You've got a nice little nest egg. You've got a house. You've got a relatively low mortgage. Just do it."

Life's short, right? You spend so much fucking time working, you might as well do something you enjoy.

I know.

I feel like I'm probably a very unhelpful person to get advice from if you've never lived that life.

Yeah, it's scary, isn't it? Until you do it, you don't know how you're going to handle it.

No.

What's the best piece of life advice you've ever heard?

I don't think I believe in life advice. Life is so subjective. My experience is different from yours. Advice is just someone else's learned experience.

You have to make those mistakes yourself. I can tell you anything, but you won't really understand it until you've lived it. That's the arrogance of giving advice.

You have to put your hand on the hob to know it's hot.

I quoted it earlier: "The harder you work, the luckier you get." I believed that for a long time. Now I think it's only partly true.

Generally, I don't like giving advice because my life is so specific to me.

I bet your therapist hates you.

My therapist fucking loves me. You'd hope so for what it costs.

Do you have any bad habits?

Yes. Loads.

I become obsessed with something and then immediately drop it.

As a kid I'd become obsessed with one cereal. My parents would buy six boxes, and by then I'd already moved on.

Do you have ADHD, Ben?

Probably.

My son has it. He does exactly that.

Yeah.

I do the same thing with food.

I'll order the same meal every time until I can't stand it anymore. Then I'll move on to something else.

That hyper-focus is probably part of why I've been successful.

Not having a holiday is probably another bad habit.

Definitely. I'm a creature of habit.

Everything I do is habitual. I crave routine.

Ironically, my life is the complete opposite.

I watch people going to work while I'm walking my dog and think, "I want that."

What...

I do.

I want the rat race.

I'll never have it.

The grass is always greener.

So if you could do what you do now but nine to five, you'd take it?

I think so.

I spend so much time thinking for myself.

Sometimes I'd love someone else to make the decisions.

I want to be a cog in the machine. Plug me into the Matrix.

My independence is both a blessing and a curse.

A lot of my success has come from pushing my own career forward, but sometimes it'd be nice if someone just tapped me on the shoulder and said, "I've got this."

That's literally one of the ADHD assessment questions. Do you feel like you're powered by a motor?

Really?

Then yes. Absolutely.

As a kid I was unbearable.

I was constantly doing impressions. Jim Carrey was everything to me.

I remember you saying that before.

Yeah. I was obsessed.

What do you dislike most about yourself?

My social stamina. I wish I had more of it.

I'm there for a good time, not a long time.

When I'm done, I'm done.

Are you one of those people who just disappears from a night out?

No.

I'll tell everyone I'm leaving. I'm not someone who vanishes.

But when I hit that point, I have to go. 

I also wish I cared a little less about what people think of me. Although, at the same time, I don't really care.

It's a contradiction.

When I've had enough of a conversation, I almost have a physical aversion to staying.

I just need to leave.

What do you mean?

It feels like I'm trapped.

My brain is just saying, "Go. Go. Go."

That's why I'll always tell people I'm heading off.

It's nothing personal.

Now I feel bad for trapping you in a conversation for an hour.

No. Not at all.

This is completely different. I'm talking about parties or social events.

I can have an amazing time for one hour or seven. But when the battery runs out, it runs out.

Do you still go to the gym?

Yeah.

Exercise is important because it gives me routine.

I don't have a normal working day, so it's something I can control.

The two places where I see progress are the gym and my PlayStation trophies.

Do you have a regular bedtime?

Not really. I usually wake up around 7:30 or 8.

I walk my dog before anything else. That has to happen.

Bedtime depends. If I'm tired, I'll go to bed at ten.

If not, I might play games until two in the morning.

If I'm watching a brilliant TV show, I'll stay up binging it.

At the moment I'm obsessed with The Pitt.

Do you have a party trick?

No.

I wish I did.

It's as embarrassing as not knowing any good jokes. 

I'd love to be brilliant at close-up magic. I'd love to pull out a deck of cards and completely blow someone's mind. I just don't have the attention span to learn it.

You need a role where you play a magician.

Exactly. Force me to learn it.

The older I get, the less interested I am in learning something unless I'm immediately good at it.

Video games are good for that though.

Exactly.

You improve quickly.

Sometimes I ignore every tutorial because I want to figure it out myself.

Then fifteen hours later I realise the game explained it all at the beginning.

If you could go back to any point in history, where would you go?

Honestly? Probably the 1990s.

Just to enjoy them again.

Maybe 1997.

They felt blissful.

I'd also like to see what people like Henry VIII actually looked like.

As someone who studied history, though, I don't have a huge desire to witness history.

I like the stories afterwards more than the events themselves. History is curated. Different people experience the same moment in completely different ways. So the version we remember probably isn't the full truth.

When was the last time you cried?

Very recently. Last Friday.

I was very drunk watching First Dates.

I cry at First Dates all the time. I also cry watching The Pitt.

Can you cry on demand?

Yes.

I don't actually know how I do it. It's a magic trick, even to me.

That's your party trick then.

Exactly.

It tends to freak people out.

How do you want to be remembered when you die?

As someone who was very good at what they did. And fundamentally a decent person. I don't need to be remarkable. I'd just like people to think I was decent.

I'll tell you something. We've interviewed about eight people recently, and seven of them have mentioned you.

Really?

Honestly. You're a bit of a through-line. You're clearly well liked.

That's genuinely lovely to hear. I've always tried to help as many people as I can.

We're all just figuring this out.

If I can make someone else's path a little easier, why wouldn't I?

I spend so much time researching things that if I learn something useful, I'd rather just give it away. That's my philosophy. Try to be as decent as possible.

What would you have written on your gravestone?

The word "idiot" would definitely be on there.

"He lived as he died... being a fucking idiot."

I'd quite like to die in an absurd way.

Quickly, though.

Please let it be quick.

I once heard about someone who died tying a sausage to his leg to make his dick look bigger.

Right.

I'd like to change my answer.

"He died as he lived... trying to enlarge his penis."

You can never really control how people remember you.

You can only try to be honest and decent.

I've become much more fearless about expressing myself recently.

As long as you're not being cruel or mean-spirited, just be honest.

I appreciate your honesty, mate. Thanks for making the time. I know you're busy as fuck.

You're welcome.

I hope you're not repulsed by the conversation now.

Not at all.

This has been great.

The social battery thing just happens sometimes.

I'm the opposite. I'm outgoing at events, but then I disappear into my hotel room for a day afterwards.

I love not having to talk to anyone afterwards.

I recently took my PlayStation to Seattle because of the jet lag and played Resident Evil Requiem until I'd finished it.

Then I spent the whole convention talking to people about Resident Evil instead of talking about myself.

It was a great escape.

It's such a good game.

Maybe not Resident Evil 6, but the rest are great.

There are definitely some stinkers.

I actually enjoyed Resident Evil 6 because everyone had already told me it was terrible.

My expectations were so low.

I still think Revelations 2 is massively underrated.

For me it's still Resident Evil 4.

Absolutely.

The remake is technically better.

But the original changed video games forever. It's one of the most influential games ever made.

Now we've ended up talking about Resident Evil.

Exactly.

People always ask what franchise I'd most like to be in. I always say, "Not Resident Evil." I'm too much of a fan.

I'd rather just enjoy it.

I message the cast after I've finished the games asking them loads of questions. They probably think I'm completely mad.

That was like me messaging you constantly while I was playing Expedition 33.

I loved it. You were one of my litmus tests for how people were going to react to that game.

None of us expected it to become what it became. You never know with games.

Sometimes the biggest hits are the ones nobody predicts.

I've been lucky enough to be part of two of those recently with Expedition 33 and Date Everything!.

One minute I'm playing a sexy door. The next I'm an immortal version of a dead painter.

I've been very lucky.

Well, I'm sure it'll keep going. I'll let you get off.

Thank you.