Within the entertainment world, many will know Anjali Bhimani as a supporting character in Marvel Studios’ Ms. Marvel, or perhaps for her extensive voice acting work. From Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight to Starfield and Overwatch 2, Bhimani’s incredible vocal talents have been displayed across both TV and video games. However, if you don’t know her from these, you may well recognise her from Dimension 20 and Critical Role, and her actual play performances, demonstrating her as a huge tabletop RPG fan.
Interview by George Chrysostomou
Ahead of her role in the new digital RPG Sunderfolk, heavily inspired by TTRPGs, we couldn’t deny the opportunity of speaking with one of its stars.
Anjali’s love for tabletop RPGs dates back to her childhood. In fact, it was her own brother who was responsible for introducing her to the hobby.
“My beautiful, wonderful, perfect brother Aneesh, when I was eight years old, gifted me the D&D starter set and I devoured it and I fell in love with this world of mystery and wonder and dragons and magic, and then I immediately bogarted his and I was off to the races.” She says of it. She would return to the genre later in life, though. “I had sort of a re-introduction to them, because when I went away to college, I stopped playing tabletop as much just because of the scheduling and everything with school was so hard. Then in 2018 my friend Marisha had suggested that I come join the cast of We’re Alive: Frontier with Ivan van Norman, and we would be playing the Outbreak: Undead game system and I fell in love with it all over again.”
As a performer and player, Anjali obviously has a strong penchant for imagining new narratives, and she draws a parallel between that interest and her love for the genre.
“I have always loved storytelling ever since I was a little girl” Anjali explains. “And what TTRPGs enable you to do is to have this wonderful combination of being in both the actor and the writer’s room. Of being in charge of the story and having agency over your own story while still being able to watch the story unfold with all of your friends. You get a chance to create and improvise and solve problems together, and you also get a chance to enjoy the virtuosity of the people sitting at the table around you. And the fact is that those dice tell a story that I don’t think, half the time, the story that ends up coming out of a particular dice roll and what we do with it, is something that I would have imagined writing in a million years.”
Anjali may have been introduced to many of you as part of the Dungeons & Dragons’ adjacent series Critical Role. She was brought into the ensemble due to her friendship with Marisha Ray and Matt Mercer, who are also integral parts of the Critical Role machine. She notes that after a few appearances, “they kept calling me back. I was very, very lucky and very, very grateful. In fact, Marisha, after that first series, told me that she thought I should DM, and I absolutely, unequivocally said no way! But I caved last year, and finally got a chance to DM thanks to the LEGO game night that Wizards of the Coast did.”
“I mean, what’s not to enjoy? We love creating these characters and all of these worlds, and I am so blessed that I have gotten to play with some of the most extraordinary Dungeon Masters and players that we have! I have a particularly soft spot for Fy’ra Rai and Lady Amangeaux from Exandria Unlimited and The Ravening War, because both of them have a lot of aspects of me in them, and I miss them, I miss them terribly. To only have a limited number of episodes with characters is always a little bit sad, but I’m hoping we see at least one of them sometime again.”
Clearly, Anjali’s time with TTRPGs has had a much more meaningful impact on her career than you may have thought. So many of the skills that are required for playing within these narrative sandboxes are also relevant within the entertainment sphere. The actor doesn’t shy away from that connection though, and when asked about whether her campaigns have improved her performances, she had this to say.
“Absolutely, unequivocally, 100% yes. There is something so lovely about getting to immerse yourself in a character for a long period of time and make decisions from that character’s mindset. And the thing is, when you are doing a role, you know, more often than not, someone is handing you your script and handing you your lines and telling you what your story is and you get to fill in the blanks a little bit, but ultimately, it’s in someone else’s hands. So being able to have an experience where you fill out not only the lines but also the thought processes, all of the things about your character, you fill it out, you react in the moment. It’s such a wonderful tool to learn about being present and thinking on your feet and focusing on the given circumstances that are going on around you as opposed to thinking about yourself because I think a lot of times when we are given a script, we get very in our head and we forget that the character is experiencing this for the very first time. Also, TTRPGs have given me the faith in myself that I don’t ever have to manufacture a single emotion; it will boil up and it will come to the surface as long as I am invested in the story. It will automatically be there, I don’t have to make anything happen.”
Despite being a great TTRPG lover, Anjali has unfortunately fallen foul of the very same pitfalls we all come across. “I’m not currently involved in a home game because, as everybody knows, the big bad of tabletop is scheduling, and so usually I’m only able to play when it’s combined with work.” But one project did stand out for the actor as a particularly special event. “Last year I did get a chance to be sort of behind the wheel of creating a campaign that we have affectionately called the Puppy Roll where I got together with a bunch of people that you all know from the TTRPG community, and created a game for them that was a livestream charity event, where we all played D&D as our pets, as our little doggos. So that will definitely be something that is continuing. I don’t want to spoil it, but we have a few things coming up soon that will be pertaining to that and some other projects that I have coming out that hopefully will enable me to continue with my own campaigns or my own creations.”
We’ll be sure to keep an eye out for those updates, but Anjali also shared a few of her favourite gameplay systems with us, that really came to shape her understanding of the genre. She said, “I really did love the Outbreak: Undead system when we played it, and it was the first time I’d played a TTRPG with such high stakes, you know, once you’re dead, you’re dead. I also really liked the Savage Worlds system; I think For the Queen is one of the greatest games ever created, the simplest mechanic, and some of the most incredible results come out of it so I really, really love that one as well. I really love Candela, I am not generally a horror genre fan when it comes to movies and TV and books, but when it comes to using it in TTRPGs, it’s a whole other thing that I’ve sort of fallen in love with.”
While we await the opportunity to watch Anjali’s next TTRPG campaign, there’s plenty of time to dive into Sunderfolk, a digital RPG where the performer has voiced an almost ludicrous array of roles, from narrator to every NPC. And to start building character sheets for our own pets!