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Critical Role game master Matthew Mercer and Dropout’s “Dimension 20” host Brennan Lee Mulligan are at the top of a media machine their 10-year-old selves never dreamed would exist: playing D&D.
Sitting down to interview each other for Variety earlier this month at Critical Role’s studio in Burbank, where they are both currently filming Campaign 4, Mulligan and Mercer broke down their rise to nontraditional fame and glory through “actual-play” shows that feature them and their castmates as they play through Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying campaigns.
“Where my sense of ambition lives is in that moment at the table where the entire world melts away and I lock in as I see how I can make someone’s dream come true,” Mulligan told Mercer. “How I see what a player is saying and go, ‘That’s awesome. We can do that. That idea you just had, we’re gonna make that come true.’ That to me is what ambition is. And it’s a wild thing too, in terms of the larger industry — we talked about [Critical Role’s] incredible adaptations, ‘The Legend of Vox Machina,’ ‘The Mighty Nein’ — there are these bizarre ways in which this hobby is now opening doors in Hollywood in a way, that who could have anticipated it?”
Mulligan continued: “But you’re walking into those spaces and through those doors and I think it’s really helpful for people to hear that whatever ambition is, I have made every choice to avoid success at every turn. Imagine, imagine a 10-year-old kid being like, ‘There’s a gap in the market, time to start playing Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve nailed it. I see the opening on the field.’ Like, no, man. No, I picked a game that got your head put in toilets and I played it hard. And then I said, ‘Time to get serious. Let’s do free improv in a basement.'”
Mercer, who has helped adapt Critical Role’s campaigns into the Amazon animated series “The Legend of Vox Machina” and “The Mighty Nein,” is equally befuddled by how the industry that has grown out of his lifelong passion for D&D is seen as a business decision that’s been decades in the making.
“I’ve seen conversations, or there have been discussions of how long this was plotted, about how Critical Role was all manufactured as an ultimate goal,” Mercer said. “And going back to that point, it was like, who fucking knew, bro? It’s wild to look back on how this whole thing has happened, but to that same degree, through this, building platforms in which we’re not reliant on external systems. We started on Twitch and YouTube, and we still stream to those places, but it’s also very dangerous from a business standpoint to put all of your stakes into a platform that you don’t control.”
Mercer pointed to how CollegeHumor vet (now Dropout CEO) Sam Reich bought the company in the wake of its implosion at Barry Dillar’s IAC and then revamped it into streaming platform Dropout, which Mulligan says is “now doing better than CollegeHumor ever did.”
“And that’s a testament to creatives having the opportunity, through a community that’ll support them, to build a space and have the right people in leadership to do so,” Mercer said. “We took a lesson from even Dropout to build our Beacon platform to help us decouple from relying on outside platforms.”
Watch Variety‘s full sitdown interview between Mercer and Mulligan via the video above.
English (US) ·