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Aliona Baranova
June 8, 2026 at 10:52 PM
Removed duplicate in-body wikilinks
Aliona Baranova is a British actress, voice actress, and motion capture performance director who voices Mordred in Tides of Annihilation. She is bilingual in English and Russian, works across live-action, video games, and motion capture, and spent several years as a performance director at Larian Studios and PitStop Productions on Baldur's Gate 3 before returning to the front of camera for a run of high-profile voice roles. Her casting in Eclipse Glow Games' debut title places her opposite her real-life partner Jennifer English, the voice of protagonist Gwendolyn, on two sides of one of the game's headline boss encounters. She is represented by Harvey Voices for voice acting work.
Baranova voices Mordred, one of the game's principal antagonists and one of the demi-gods allied with the forces of Avalon. In Tides of Annihilation, Mordred is reimagined as a poised, armored female demi-god rather than the male traitor knight of traditional Arthurian legend, and her confrontation with Gwendolyn is the headline set-piece of the extended gameplay footage released alongside the game's reveal. The fight takes place inside a dimension-shifting library in the folded mirror realm, where gravity rotates and architecture reassembles mid-combo while the two characters trade dialogue between attacks.
The casting is deliberate. Baranova and Jennifer English are partners off-screen, and placing them on opposite sides of a fight built around taunts, back-and-forth, and close personal confrontation gives the sequence a charged, almost intimate quality that the developers leaned into in their public-facing reveal material. Both performers have spoken publicly about the project being the first time they are playing directly opposite each other, and Baranova in particular has noted that her blonde, deliberately-styled Mordred was a conscious swing away from the character types audiences most associate with her voice.
Before Tides of Annihilation, Baranova's highest-profile credit was a long run as a motion capture performance director on Baldur's Gate 3, split between Larian Studios and PitStop Productions. The role spanned roughly four years and covered hundreds of named and background characters. Baldur's Gate 3 is notable for capturing motion data from its voice cast alongside their audio, and Baranova's job as performance director was to shape that combined recording so that vocal choices and physical choices stayed in sync. In practice that meant working with performers on blocking, gesture, eye-line, and emotional beats while they stood on a capture volume in mocap suits, so that animators downstream received body language that matched the line rather than neutral movement layered under it.
She also performed on camera and on microphone during the same production, credited in the game's roster for named characters including Corinna and Xeph alongside additional voices across the cast. Baldur's Gate 3's capture pipeline was the project that brought her together with Jennifer English, who played the Shadowheart companion and who has since become one of the most in-demand voice leads in the industry. The working relationship between the two on that production has fed directly into how their subsequent shared projects, including Tides of Annihilation, have been cast and pitched.
Baranova has built an extensive parallel career as a performer across major modern video game releases. Her voice work leans on her bilingual background, letting her cover roles that call for Slavic or Eastern European accents in games with international settings, and she has also contributed to ensemble-heavy fantasy titles where she doubles multiple side characters in the same production. Notable voice acting credits include:
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025): Marie, Estelle, and Ulysse, plus additional voices across the ensemble.
Lies of P: Overture: Veronique in the prequel expansion to the Belle Epoque Pinocchio-inspired action game.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty: Lina Malina, one of the supporting characters in the Dogtown expansion.
Total War: Warhammer III: Ulrika Magdova, the vampiric Kislevite lord drawn from Warhammer Fantasy lore.
Baldur's Gate 3 (2023): Corinna, Xeph, and additional voices, alongside her performance direction duties.
Tides of Annihilation (2026): Mordred, demi-god antagonist.
Outside games, Baranova works as an actress across British television, film, and stage. Her screen credits include the ITV drama Maternal (2023), Sky's Missile from the East, and the BBC's Moonflower Murders (2024), giving her regular camera work alongside her gaming output. She has also performed in motion capture for feature films, with credited mocap work on Greta Gerwig's Barbie and on The Matrix Resurrections, the 2021 return to the Wachowski universe. That breadth across live-action, theatrical mocap, and game performance direction is unusual and shapes how she approaches individual roles, because she tends to think about characters as physical performances first and vocal performances second.
Baranova's work tends to pair precise, controlled physicality with a vocal range that can slide from warm and naturalistic into cold, commanding, or openly theatrical. Her Mordred in Tides of Annihilation sits squarely at the colder end of that range: pre-release footage shows the character fighting with measured, deliberate motion and delivering taunts in a clipped, even register rather than shouting through the fight. That tonal choice is consistent with how she has described her approach in interviews around Lies of P: Overture and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, where she has spoken about serving the rhythm of a scene before any individual line reading and about using mocap rehearsals to decide how a character moves before deciding exactly how they sound. In games where she doubles multiple voices in one production, she leans on her performance-director background to keep each of her characters physically distinct, even in booth-only sessions where the animation is generated later. She is represented by Harvey Voices for voice acting work.
Baranova's creative partnership with Jennifer English is a running thread through recent years of her career. The two met during the Baldur's Gate 3 motion capture shoots, have since appeared together at industry conventions and press events, and share several recent credits: both are in the cast of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and both are attached to Tides of Annihilation, where they now anchor one of the game's most prominent confrontations as Gwendolyn and Mordred. Eclipse Glow Games' marketing for Tides of Annihilation has leaned into that pairing, and trailers and press material have foregrounded the fact that the two performers are playing adversaries for the first time. For players, the practical takeaway is that the central Mordred encounter in the game is not just a boss fight with two recognizable genre voices, but a scene built to pay off a working relationship the two performers have already established across multiple productions.
