Abubakar Salim
Abubakar Salim is an actor, born 1993.
Abubakar Salim does two jobs, and the second is unusual for an actor: he is a video game developer, the founder and chief executive of Surgent Studios. Recognition arrived from that side first, with a British Academy Games Award nomination for Assassin's Creed Origins and a place among the BAFTA Breakthrough Brits, which is not the standard route into prestige television.
His screen breakthrough was Father in Raised by Wolves, an android raising human children on an empty planet, programmed for relentless paternal cheer and equipped with an inexhaustible supply of terrible jokes. That is a very hard part to calibrate: play it broad and the character becomes a gag, play it flat and the horror underneath never arrives. Salim keeps the sincerity absolutely fixed and lets the discomfort come from the gap between his tone and everything happening around him.
Since then he has moved into large productions in supporting roles: Alyn of Hull in House of the Dragon, General Dumas in Napoleon, voice work including Zanror in The Legend of Vox Machina, and earlier television in Jamestown and Fortitude. He is also a recurring presence across the Critical Role universe, which is closer to live performance than to conventional acting and plays to the improvisational side of him.
Born in Welwyn Garden City in 1993 and Kenyan-British, he is at a point where the twin career is likely to matter more than any single role.
Movies (3)
TV (12)
Where to start with Abubakar Salim
Nothing else here matters as much as Raised by Wolves, so start there. Salim's Father is the most interesting android performance television has produced in years, a machine performing fatherhood with total conviction, and the show is worth watching even when its plotting goes sideways, which it does.
House of the Dragon is the largest audience he has reached and gives him a good, physical, comparatively straightforward part. Napoleon is a small role in a big film, though General Dumas is a genuinely interesting historical figure to get. Jamestown is the earlier television that shows him building the range, and Fortitude is the atmospheric oddity. For the voice work, The Legend of Vox Machina is the polished version and Critical Role the unpolished, improvised one, which is arguably the better showcase of his instincts. His game development work is not a screen credit and is the part of his career least visible here.