Matthew Lillard Talks”D&D” Show, “Scooby-Doo,” “Scream,” and More

Actor Matthew Lillard is about as busy as they come. Less than a month after Five Nights at Freddy's, a film in which he has a significant role, was released, he's readying the premiere of his Dungeons & Dragons show on a D&D-centric streaming channel. Some might know he's a lifelong D&D fan. He's happy to tell you all about it.

The 53-year-old actor, maybe best known as Shaggy from both early 2000s Scooby-Doo movies (and the main voice of the animated character since 2009), was gracious enough to talk to me for a few minutes regarding the launch of Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!, his show that is premiering on Amazon Freevee and Plex TV on November 16th, 2023.

Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! will be a part of the programming lineup on the "Dungeons & Dragons Adventures" channel on those respective streaming outlets. In contrast to other shows about D&D, which can be as long as three hours, Lillard and his partners wanted something a bit more rigorously paced and shorter:

So, five years ago I started a company with four of my best friends [....] we make high-end gaming accessories for D&D and all these different brands. In this creation process [....] we're all over 50, and we wanted to get into streaming, doing a podcast, or some kind of Twitch TV. Everybody in the [D&D] space was doing like three hour shows, and we don't like watching three hour Dungeons & Dragons shows [....] So, we were asking ourselves 'how do we a shorter show?' Well, we kill all the heroes.

Lillard structures the show by introducing four "first-level," nubile characters who are going off into the world to become heroes of legend. They run into a popular monster, get completely annihilated by the monster, and the show concludes in about an hour. It's chock-full of popular faces like Patton Oswalt, Seth Green, and Skeet Ulrich as well as hilarious hijinks.

On top of his Dungeons & Dragons show, Lillard is obviously very well-known for his role as Shaggy in Scooby-Doo. He played the live-action version of the character in the 2002 and 2004 movies, and became the primary voice for the animated iteration of the character in 2009.

He talked about how the Raja Gosnell-directed film from 2002 originally had a slightly raunchier edge to it, responded to a popular Scream theory, and talked about his directorial debut, Fat Kid Rules the World.

Take a listen to my interview with Matthew Lillard below, and read more about Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! on IMDb.