Gideon Emery was born in England, but his childhood took shape in Johannesburg South Africa. He was the class clown, the kid doing school plays and impressions for his friends and family. Through this, Gideon sparked his creative drive and learned hat he loved to entertain. It gave him, as he says, the greatest pleasure. When it came time to choose, he applied to both fine arts and drama school in Johannesburg and was accepted to each. He chose to pursue acting, reasoning with teenage logic that it might prove the more lucrative living. The training was traditional and thorough: a multi-year honors program in the British mold, Stanislavski and Grotowski, movement, voice, set building, and even a stretch of TV production. Gideon was skilled and fortunate enough that during his schooling he also became a working professional actor and the opening into the profession came almost by accident. In his final year he tagged along to a pantomime audition only because a friend was going. The show featured Bill Flynn, a beloved South African actor playing the dame, and Flynn generously introduced him to his agent, who was part of a firm that, unusually for the time, also handled voice work. They sent him off to cut a professional demo, and a career he had been quietly rehearsing since childhood began in to become a reality. Gideon spent the next ten years working in South Africa performing for commercial video, voiceover, and a play or two a year to "keep himself honest". Although he had built a solid foundation in South Africa, he knew he wanted to test himself further and had his eyes set on Hollywood.

By this time he amassed a decade of press, secured an EB-1 "extraordinary ability" visa, and moved to Los Angeles around the age of thirty, in the early 2000s. He landed a voice agent right away and a Mini Cooper launch promo that helped keep him afloat, but even with this start, building a foundation in LA was still the hardest part of his career. In time, his command of accents made him ideal for videogames where one actor voices several characters and games soon became his bread and butter. This eventually led him into performance capture where he felt right at home as if we were back in the theatre. The hardest adjustment, he says, was unlearning years of playing to the back of the theatre for the intimacy of the camera and the suit. He soon came to see motion capture as the ultimate, most challenging form of performance in that incorporates everything from head to toe. This led to one of his favorite and most popular roles, BD-1 from Star Wars. A role he found genuinely fresh, with no facial or likeness capture, built almost entirely through physical performance and puppeteering. He took the performance even further and developed the droid's "voice" with a nose flute introduced to him by his generous castmate Debra Wilson, shaping melodic beeps with emotional content rather than flat robot noise. Gideon says playing BD is some of the most theatrically run, joyful work he has done, a return to why he got into acting in the first place.