Ashly Burch on Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands: ‘I didn’t expect the story they told’

Tiny Tina, the impish Borderlands NPC now better known as an unhinged Dungeon Master, is Ashly Burch’s first video game character. Actor behind Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy and co-lead of Apple TV’s Mythic QuestHer career begins when the Dungeon Master, who is out of control, pulls the rug from under her feet. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands.

Burch claims that even though she has learned a lot over the past decade about the character she and her brother Anthony created, it is all still a mystery to her. Tina started as a pastiche of someone they both knew in high school, melded with a four-year-old “in her pterodactyl phase, where she’s kind of screaming in response to everything,” Burch said with a laugh.

“I didn’t know there was going to be that other piece to it,” she said in an interview with Polygon. That “other piece” is somewhat spoilery, but for those who played Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, the premium expansion to 2012’s Borderlands 2The same piece of jewelry is found in Wonderlands’ fourth-wall demolishing story, and it gives the tongue-in-cheek shooter some bittersweet, lump-in-the-throat depth at the end.

[Ed. note: Spoilers for Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands and Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep follow.]

“It’s so bizarre to imagine that she could be popular enough or important enough to justify headlining her own [game],” Burch said. She is also leading A-list comedians Wanda Sykes and Andy Samberg through an absurd tabletop RPG campaign. “We’ve recorded the whole game, the game is out, I’ve seen the game, I’ve played the game. But it’s still, like, hard for my brain to compute.”

Wonderlands Borderlands Spinoff, it is by definition, a Borderlands-inspired game. It uses the same system, has the same gameplay loops and features some of the same characters. But Tiny Tina’s unexpected popularity comes from the very humane realization that she leads this wacky role-playing game as a means of grieving her friend Roland, the vault hunter who dies at the end of Borderlands 2. You can do this by leaning back into the character device. Wonderlands It almost feels like a spinoff of its parent series. At any rate, its blend of magic, firearms, and zany character classes is for sure a fresher take on the formula than 2019’s Borderlands 3.

Sam Winkler Wonderlands’ writer, said Gearbox Software had always envisioned a follow-up to Dragon Keep As the studio was being developed Borderlands 3. But then “it just became clear, We have so many things here that we would like to make it our own platform,” Winkler said. “We said, ‘OK, all right, if thIt is is not, you know, an addendum, if this is not a coda to a larger story, but its own stand-alone thing, then we have to think differently about when it takes place and what the characters are here. That’s where we arose with this idea of ‘We want Tina, because Tina is this.’”

This brings back Burch, in a very familiar role, but one which wasn’t necessarily a lead. So where Winkler felt an obligation to give Burch room to grow and lead the character she’d created a decade ago, Burch reciprocated, understanding that she needed the structure Winkler’s story would provide for someone who had been a comedic-relief supporting cast member.

“Depending on what projects you’re working on, some people are very specific about the script,” Burch said. “Which I don’t begrudge; you pour your whole heart and soul into this thing, and you spend so much time with it, you don’t really want people to mess with it. But it’s really fun, when you’re an actor, to have people who want you to play with it, want to see what you bring to it, want to be surprised. […] I had a lot of freedom to mess around or improv, to try weird things, and they were always receptive to it.”

Winkler states that Burch being given free reign with Tina was crucial to the development of the script. “The amount of improv that is part of Tina is so crucial,” he said. “If you ask Ashley for three takes, you are going to get three wildly different things. And the amount of content that we are able to get from these sessions allows us a lot of wiggle room.”

Gearbox Software/2K Games

This was especially critical as Burch, Sykes, Arnett, and Samberg all recorded their lines solo, reacting to a director’s prompts instead of an actor next to them. “This idea of role-play and, you know, ‘I attack the dragon,’ or, ‘I slice the bartender’s head off,’ that kind of thing — they did that extremely well,” Winkler said of Burch’s co-stars. “Like Andy has this line about romancing the drawbridge [early on in a tutorial level]. He understood immediately why it was so good. […] They’re very sharp at what they do, so there’s very minimal onboarding.”

Burch, however, still understood that a high-energy character like Tiny Tina requires more guardrails, even when she’s the lead and the personality driving the whole game. “In other contexts, you’re getting Tina in bite-sized chunks,” Burch explained. “So she’s screaming half the time. Tiny Tina also gives gameplay information. This is something new in the game. I don’t think that’s ever really happened. This means she has to act as your mentor, which is not something that she often does. She’s usually doing little raps and talking about ladies’ butts.

“So yeah, this is another fun thing about doing Wonderlands — it’s weird to use this word in regards to Tiny Tina,” Burch continued, “but what is a more Subtle Joke here What’s the more understated way that we could play this? And I think, I hope, other people agree that we were successful in finding a way to balance that, but she still feels like Tina.”

Tiny Tina’s WonderlandsLaunched at the end March for PlayStation 3, PC, and Xbox (as an exclusive timed on Epic Games Store) It launched last week for Windows PC via Steam. It’s been a critical success for Gearbox Software and 2K Games, and a necessary reset for a 13-year-old tentpole franchise.

But it’s also a lesson to developers — and actors — to simply go with what works; the audience is never wrong. Tiny Tina may have been an unexpectedly endearing character, but just because Burch and Winkler didn’t plan on that happening doesn’t mean they can’t develop her, and develop situations for her, like they knew she would be a fan favorite all along.

“I don’t think I would have expected the story that y’all chose to tell,” Burch said to Winkler. “It is such an interesting thing, being an actor who feels such investment and connection to a character. And then, because you are in close collaboration with writers, you discover things about your character that you didn’t even know.”