Ashly Burch

Ashly Burch is an American actress, voice actress, writer, and producer whose work across video games, animation, live-action television, and online video has made her one of the more recognisable creative figures of her generation. Born on 19 June 1990 in Coronado, California, she is the daughter of Sephardic Jewish parents and grew up in a household where performance and humour were everyday currencies. Her older brother, Anthony Burch, became a games writer best known for his work at Gearbox Software, and the siblings' early collaborations laid the groundwork for a career that has consistently straddled comedy and craft. Burch attended the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, graduating in 2012, and has cited her time there as foundational to her later work as a writer and showrunner-adjacent contributor on prestige television.

Burch first attracted attention through Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'?, the long-running comedy web series she created with her brother in 2008. Originally produced for the gaming site Destructoid before moving to Loading Ready Run and later finding a home on YouTube, the series cast Ashly as a heightened, gleefully unhinged version of herself, terrorising Anthony with absurdist takes on whatever game the pair were ostensibly playing. The show ran for more than a decade, accruing a devoted following in gaming circles and acting as an informal calling card that introduced her sense of comic timing to the developers who would later cast her in some of the medium's most prominent roles. The series also demonstrated her willingness to write, perform, and produce simultaneously, a triple-threat profile that has shaped most of her subsequent career.

Her transition into mainstream voice acting accelerated with Borderlands 2 in 2012, where she voiced Tiny Tina, the chaotic thirteen-year-old explosives expert written by her brother. The performance, equal parts manic energy and unexpected pathos, became a fan favourite and established Burch as a voice capable of carrying both broad comedy and genuine emotional weight. She returned to the role in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Borderlands 3, the standalone spin-off Tiny Tina's Wonderlands in 2022, and several pieces of downstream content. The same year Borderlands 2 arrived, she lent her voice to Chloe Price in Dontnod's episodic adventure Life Is Strange, a role that would come to define a significant portion of her audience. Chloe's combination of bravado and grief, delivered across the original 2015 game and its 2017 prequel-adjacent material, won the British Academy Games Award for Performer in 2016 and is regularly cited among the most affecting performances in the medium.

In 2017 Burch took on Aloy, the protagonist of Guerrilla Games' Horizon Zero Dawn, a sweeping post-post-apocalyptic action game in which a young hunter unravels the truth behind a world overrun by robotic megafauna. The role required Burch to anchor a tentpole AAA title with a quieter, more grounded register than her comic work had suggested, and she returned to it for the 2022 sequel Horizon Forbidden West and its 2023 expansion Burning Shores. Aloy has since become one of PlayStation's signature characters, and Burch has spoken in interviews about the unusual experience of seeing her likeness, motion capture, and voice combined into a figure used to market an entire console generation. Around the same period she voiced Mel and Sasha in Disney's animated series The Owl House, Cassie Hack in the audio drama adaptation of Hack/Slash, and a recurring rotation of characters in Adventure Time, We Bare Bears, and DuckTales.

Her live-action profile expanded considerably with Apple TV+'s Mythic Quest, the workplace comedy set inside a fictional video game studio, on which she has served as both a writer and a series regular since its 2020 launch. As Rachel, a junior tester navigating the studio's internal politics and her relationship with co-worker Dana, Burch has been able to draw on her own years inside the games industry, and her writing credits on the show have included some of its more emotionally direct half-hours. She also co-created and starred in the Mythic Quest spin-off Mythic Quest: Side Quest, and her work on the parent series earned her Writers Guild of America and Independent Spirit Award nominations. Marvel Studios cast her as Kate Bishop in the animated multiverse series What If...?, where she voices the character across several alternate-reality scenarios, and she has appeared in the English-language dub of Attack on Titan as Sasha Blouse, the bread-loving scout whose arc became one of the anime's most discussed.

Beyond the marquee titles, Burch's filmography is unusually dense for someone still in her mid-thirties. She has voiced characters in Fortnite, Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Apex Legends, Destiny 2, League of Legends, Overwatch 2, The Outer Worlds, Sea of Thieves, Pyre, and a long string of independent releases, and she has narrated audiobooks and lent her voice to commercials and animated shorts. She co-hosted the cooking-and-comedy series Cartridge Club and the gaming podcast Polygon Show, and has been a frequent live presenter at events such as The Game Awards, BAFTA Games, and various Comic-Cons. Her writing credits extend to episodes of Adventure Time: Distant Lands and the Netflix animated series Disenchantment.

Burch has spoken openly in interviews and on social media about her struggles with anxiety, an eating disorder during her teens and twenties, and the pressures of working in two industries that prize visibility, and she has used that platform to advocate for mental-health resources within the games industry in particular. She is a long-time supporter of organisations such as Take This and Project HEAL, and has appeared at fundraisers and panels alongside developers, clinicians, and fellow performers to discuss burnout, parasocial dynamics, and the emotional toll of motion-capture work. She lives in Los Angeles and divides her time between film and television sets, recording studios across the United States and the United Kingdom, and the convention circuit that has been a constant of her career since the Hey Ash days. With more than fifteen years of voice work, a sustained run on a flagship Apple TV+ comedy as both performer and writer, a BAFTA on her shelf, and a back catalogue that takes in Life Is Strange, Horizon Zero Dawn, Borderlands, Mythic Quest, What If...?, and Attack on Titan, she has built a career that treats games, animation, and prestige comedy as a single continuous medium.