Abubakar Salim, the House of the Dragon actor who would rather own the game

Abubakar Salim

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	January 7, 1993 Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, England
Occupation	Actor and video game developer
Known for	Napoleon
Awards	2 BAFTA

Many players knew Abubakar Salim as a voice before they ever saw his face. They spent dozens of hours inside Bayek, the grieving Medjay at the heart of Assassin’s Creed Origins, and television audiences later met him as the android Father in Raised by Wolves and as Alyn of Hull, the sailor bound to Corlys Velaryon in House of the Dragon. Yet the part Salim talks about most comes with no script. He runs Surgent Studios, the British games company he founded, which has released three games, won a BAFTA and, at its lowest point, put its whole team on notice of redundancy. His career keeps asking the same thing: whether the actor is paying for the developer, or the developer has become the reason to keep acting.

Salim comes from Welwyn Garden City, in Hertfordshire, a first-generation Briton of Kenyan descent. His father worked as a software engineer for Xerox and his mother as a carer. It was his father who introduced him to video games, a shared habit that would later become the subject of his first game. Acting arrived early and quickly: he joined the National Youth Theatre at sixteen after the first audition he ever did, and a scholarship took him on to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

By the time he graduated from LAMDA with a degree in acting in 2014, Salim, born on 7 January 1993, had already played Osric in Prince of Denmark at the National Theatre and made his television debut in The Jury. The years that followed were the ones every working British actor recognises: a Secret Service agent in 24: Live Another Day, an airport guard in the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive”, an episode of Strike, and stage work at the Donmar Warehouse and on Cheek by Jowl’s touring production of The Winter’s Tale.

The break came in a game. As Bayek of Siwa in Assassin’s Creed Origins, released by Ubisoft in 2017, Salim carried a revenge story across ancient Egypt and earned a nomination for the BAFTA Games Award for performer. BAFTA then named him one of its Breakthrough Brits in 2019. He has said that the job showed him how games are actually built, and that watching the process from inside was what made him want to make them himself.

Television caught up. He played Pedro in the second and third series of the Sky One drama Jamestown, appeared in the BBC One thriller Informer and in the final series of Fortitude, and in 2020 took the lead role of Father in Raised by Wolves, the HBO Max science-fiction series produced by Ridley Scott, as one of two androids raising human children on a hostile planet. The show ran for two seasons and 18 episodes. Scott used him again in Napoleon, where he played General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas.

In 2020 he announced Silver Rain Games, soon renamed Surgent Studios, with himself as chief executive. Its first release, Tales of Kenzera: Zau, came out through EA Originals in April 2024. Salim directed the game and voiced its hero, a young shaman who bargains with the god of death to bring his father back, a story he built out of his own grief after his father died. It was a platformer drawn from African mythology, made by a first-time studio with a famous founder, and it was received as a personal work rather than a celebrity side project.

The business did not follow the reviews. Within months of launch Surgent cut more than a dozen staff, and by October 2024 the entire team was on redundancy notice and the games division was on hiatus while the company looked for money. Salim was at the same time joining the main cast of House of the Dragon, which is the uncomfortable part of the story: the profile that got an unknown studio a deal with Electronic Arts could not keep its developers employed. The recognition arrived after the damage. In April 2025 Tales of Kenzera: Zau won the BAFTA Games Award for Game Beyond Entertainment, and Salim, visibly moved, accepted it for a studio that had nearly stopped existing.

Surgent survived by changing scale. After meeting Pocketpair, the publisher of Palworld, at an industry event, Salim made Dead Take, a first-person psychological horror game released on PC on 31 July 2025, with Neil Newbon and Ben Starr in live-action leads and cameos from Laura Bailey, Matthew Mercer and Sam Lake. As creative director he set it inside a Hollywood Hills mansion, where an actor searches for a missing friend. “The story is pulled directly from my firsthand knowledge of what it’s like trying to make your way as an actor,” he told Inverse, adding that pretty much every role was written with the cast in mind. In March 2026 the studio put FixForce, a cooperative extraction platformer about clumsy repair robots, into early access, a deliberate swerve into comedy. Project Uso, the darker role-playing game Surgent showed in prototype, still has no announced publisher.

The acting has never stopped, and it remains the most visible part of his work. Salim joined House of the Dragon in its second season in 2024 as Alyn of Hull, opposite Steve Toussaint as Corlys. The third season, which ran on HBO and HBO Max from 21 June to 9 August 2026, built towards the Battle of the Gullet; Salim described Alyn as starting the season volatile and angry before maturing into a man drawn into the politics of Westeros. In games he voiced Keller in Dying Light: The Beast and Atticus in Highguard, released in 2026.

HBO has ordered a fourth season of House of the Dragon, though Salim’s place in it has not been confirmed. His announced voice work continues in Emberville and Touchstarved, both in production. The more revealing question sits at Surgent, where Project Uso waits for a partner. If it gets made, it will be the clearest sign yet that the studio no longer needs the actor’s day job to keep its lights on.

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Tags: actors, Ridley Scott, house of the dragon, Abubakar Salim, Assassin's Creed Origins, Raised by Wolves

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