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Felica Day – APPEARANCESPatton Oswalt Talks Comedy, Change and What Happens If You Never Leave Home with NPR
Patton Oswalt On Comedy, Change, And What Happens If You Never Leave Home
by LINDA HOLMES
In this image released by Paramount Pictures, Patton Oswalt portrays
Matt Freehauf in Young Adult.
You might know Patton Oswalt as a stand-up comedian, as a writer, as a player on TV shows like United States Of Tara andDollhouse, as the voice of the primary rodent in Ratatouille, or as the New York Giants obsessive in the dark film Big Fan. Now, he’s appearing opposite Charlize Theron in the black comedyYoung Adult.
Oswalt plays Matt Freehauf, who’s minding his own business in Mercury, Minnesota when Mavis Gary (Theron), once his classmate and now a woman spiraling into many bad things at the same time, comes to town to reclaim her high-school boyfriend. The two become drinking buddies, despite the fact that Matt is repulsed by Mavis’ scheming.
On Sunday’s Weekend Edition, Oswalt tells Audie Cornish that he appreciated the fact that while Matt may be a small-town guy, the script (by Juno writer Diablo Cody) doesn’t present the people of Mercury as simpletons. “I loved that the people living in the small town are actually happy and have lives of their own,” he says, adding that all too often in the movies, “the small town, they’re just these harmless potato people who are there to make the hero better.”
In developing the character with an acting coach — the first time he’s done so for a film role — Oswalt says he had to consider the way his life might have gone had he never ventured out into the world as he did when he went into comedy as a young guy. “I really had to imagine the kind of person that I would have been if I had never left my hometown. I don’t think I would have been a very pleasant person.” Not that speculating about alternative futures is ever easy: “I had to go back and reverse-engineer a life that I decided not to live.”
Oswalt also says he’s grateful for getting to play roles like Matt, because like anyone, there are ways he might be typecast. “Definitely the kind of geeky — I’m amazed I haven’t done more, like, nerdy tech guys to the hot leading man in all these action movies. I don’t know why I haven’t been sitting in a van with headphones on, going, ‘We’ve lost the signal!’ … maybe that’s in my future, I don’t know.”
His future has, of course, already seen shifts, some of which Cornish notes are conspicuous across his comedy albums. Oswalt agrees, and says cataloging those changes has been useful. “I didn’t even realize that was my aim, but I’m very, very commited to saying exactly what I feel right now on each album. And I have no problem with people saying, ‘Well, you know, in your first album you say you hate kids and you’ll never get married, and now on the fourth one, you’re talking about raising a kid.’ I’m like yeah, because at the time, that is how I felt. I’m glad that’s been permanently recorded. You see a person changing and growing.”
And change and growth, Oswalt finds, are a useful complement to the constant excitement about youth. “We’re rewarding either the reality or the apperance of youth, which is why you have all these people in their fifties trying to act like they’re seventeen. You know, it’s great to be young. Be young. By all means, be young. But always remember that youth is also kinda dumb, and doesn’t know a lot yet. So what you want to worship above youth, I think, is beauty, and beauty is so beyond just appearances after a while. Because you can be with someone who’s good-looking, if they open their mouths and they’re an idiot, then they cease to be beautiful very quickly.”
It can be particularly useful to have a chronicle of how much you’ve changed, he says, if you happen to have kids. “I like that you see me when I was a much dumber youth,” he says, adding that one day, he may be able to comfort his daughter about her own anxieties by showing her evidence of his own past: “Daddy made mistakes, too. Here you go.”
Original Interview at NPR
Felicia Day Gives io9 an Exclusive Preview of the Next Guild Comic
Felicia Day and Sandeep Parikh give us an exclusive preview of the next Guild comic!
io9 recently had the opportunity to catch up with Felicia Day and Sandeep Parikh, the stars of the long-running fantasy gaming web series The Guild. This duo also co-wroteThe Guild: Zaboo, the next Guild tie-in comic book to hit the stands.
Check out an exclusive sneak peek of the comic’s first six pages and learn what’s up with The Guild‘s sixth season.
First off, here’s a preview and plot synopsis of The Guild: Zaboo one-shot comic, courtesy of Dark Horse Comics. This issue’s in stores Wednesday, December 28:
Writer: Felicia Day, Sandeep Parikh
Artist: Becky Cloonan
Colorist: Dave Stewart
Cover Artist: Evan DorkinZaboo has loved Cyd’s game avatar Codex from afar since the two first met playing The Game. Just what he’ll do for love comes to the fore as he senses Cyd is in trouble and embarks on a real-life quest to escape his mother and become Cyd’s knight in shining armor.
And here’s our conversation with Sandeep and Felicia about all things Guild-related…
Sandeep, how did you get involved co-writing the Zaboo comic?
Sandeep Parikh: I think Felicia wanted a different perspective. We’ve been collaborating for years, long before The Guild and Legend of Neil. We did improv together, and we cowrote the Bollywood Guild song. In writing, I took everything from my experience as a director and tried to be as visual as possible. We have a page per plot point, and it was great to have Felicia help me through the process.
Season Five of The Guild recently wrapped up this October. What’s coming up next for the show?
Felicia Day: We’re still actually waiting on the pick-up for next season. The show is owned by me, so it’s determined by the best opportunity for it, but I fully intend on doing future seasons, particularly with the cliffhanger for Season Five. It’s really exciting where we can go with the characters and that story. In the next couple months, we’ll see where the series goes.
And what can we expect from future Guild comics?
FD: I have a couple more things on the horizon coming for next year. I can’t talk about them right at this second, but I’m definitely doing comics. The Guild really lends itself to the format, so depending on what happens with future seasons, I really want to integrate comics into the future of The Guild.
SP: The Zaboo comic leads up to first frame of The Guild web series. All of the comic one-shots have been before the webseries takes place.
FD: We added a lot of game aspects to this comic, and this issue brings us up to the timeline of Season 1, Episode 1. The origin story of Codex and the arc of all five seasons of The Guild are filled in with this comic.
SP: If you’re a gamer and you look real close, you’ll see a few shout outs to your favorite games. Zaboo’s perspective on the world is through video games, so page by page sends you to a new world. I like that you can actually play the comic. If you read the margins on the pages, you can learn how to gain XP while reading it.
In Season Five, we saw a flip-flopping of Codex and Zaboo’s romantic dynamic. How did that come about?
SP: I really love what Felicia did with the characters. The best part of playing Zaboo is that he has some of most interesting arcs of the entire show. He really grows and evolves more every season. Our relationship is the same thing. How she handled our relationship this season felt really believable and honest.
Any sort of crazy behind-the-scenes stuff happen while filming Season Five?
FD: In the DVD that’s coming out later this month through Amazon, there’s a behind-the-scenes there that you will not believe. There are two characters who were supposed to be identical twins. So we hired identical twins, but they never made it to set. We have a very awesome, behind-the-scenes piece on how we were waiting for these twins, and we ended up choosing an extra, a Guild volunteer from the Twitter account to become two different roles this season. She had never been an actor before!
SP: She had to level up pretty fast!
FD: It’s an awesome story because she was a fan, and now she’s canon!
What other projects do the two of you have coming up?
FD: I’m launching a new YouTube channel right now called Geek and Sundry. We’re producing a slate of three or four shows right now. Not a very restful holiday, but an interesting next year to come out with some more projects!
SP: I’m actually in a writers’ session right now for a brand new web series that I’m going to create with My Damn Channel. I can’t really say too much, but it’s going to be awesome. It’s right up the alley of fans of The Guild and The Legend of Neil.
Original Interview at io9
Felicia Day Talks About The Guild FCBD Comic & Dragon Age: Redemption with TFAW
Felicia Day Talks About The Guild DCBD Comic & Dragon Age: Redemption
Written by Elisabeth&TFAW
Dec 5 2011
Dark Horse Month was too big and exciting to contain in just one month, so we’re closing it down with a “visit” from the one and only Felicia Day, creator/writer/producer/star of The Guild, her wildly popular web series focusing on a misfit group of gamers. We chatted with her about the upcoming The Guild: Zaboo one-shot, her Free Comic Book Day comic (a flip-book paired with Buffy the Vampire Slayer!), her latest web series, Dragon Age: Redemption, and more.
We’ve also got an exclusive six-page preview of The Guild: Zaboo–enjoy!
TFAW.com: Now that you’ve completed both The Guild miniseries and several one-shots, how are you enjoying the process of making comics?
Felicia Day: I feel like I’ve really hit a personal stride, that I actually look forward to working with the format and thinking more visually. The process is a lot more fun now that I’ve gotten my own methodology down.
TFAW.com: Can you give us any hints about what we’ll discover about Zaboo in The Guild: Zabooone-shot?
FD: Sandeep [Parikh, her co-star and co-writer of the one-shot] is a director, so I think this issue is much more visual, similar to the Bladezz issue (which I did with Guild director Sean Becker). The cool thing is that Sandeep is a big gamer as well, so we tried to infuse a lot of gamer ideas into the script and the visuals. There are homages to everything from FPSs to Mario Kart. I’m excited for people to read it.
TFAW.com: Does this take place before or after Season 5?
FD: As are all the one shots of the core characters I’ve done this year, this one is pre-season 1, with the timeline catching up to the web series by the end of the issue.
TFAW.com: Dark Horse just announced there will be a Guild comic for Free Comic Book Day–as a flip book with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. How do you feel about that pairing?
FD: SUPER PSYCHED. Ahem, sorry about the caps. I didn’t know they were going to do that, and to be paired with such a great title is an honor for sure. I was excited to be able to get word about the series out and support such a great event.
TFAW.com: What can you tell us about the storyline for the FCBD comic? Will it tie into Season 6 of the web series at all?
FD: It’s a stand-alone for people who might not be familiar with the show and it’s sort of out of time with the series, but canon.
TFAW.com: Have you considered expanding your comics work–writing a Buffy story, or a superhero book?
FD: I would love to fit in other comic projects, but I am really stretched thin right now. Next year is going to bring some big changes though, and I hope to fit in more writing alongside with all the web series I’ll be doing. The idea of creating something new is really appealing to me though.
TFAW.com: Cyd and Zaboo’s relationship has been through several twists and turns: she took a second look at him romantically in Season 5, but that fizzled after a brief experiment. Where will they be in Season 6?
FD: I can’t tell, and if I could I wouldn’t anyway 
. The show is still not picked up, so we have a lot of options with what we can do with the show, actually. I might be interested in doing something different with the format. We’ll see what the new year brings!
TFAW.com: A lot of characters made a quantum leap in Season 5: Tinkerballa (ahem, April Lou) opened up to Cyd, Vork fell in love, kind of, and most importantly, it looks like Cyd has an actual job–with The Game! Are we going to see a more “functional” Guild in Season 6?
FD: Of course not, functional is boring! I am having fun bringing the characters out of their shells a bit, though. Their friendship is making them better people, which is the central story of The Guild, really.
TFAW.com: I just rewatched Dragon Age: Redemption and really enjoyed it. How did you prepare for such a physical role?
FD: It was monumental will power that got me out of bed at 6 am every day for three months, doing two hours of working out, then going to work for eight hours and working on the script and The Guildand everything else I have to do, then training again before I went to bed. I think I almost broke myself, but it was 100% worth it. It definitely made me respect big action heroes more, who literally make that process their life. I don’t think I’ll ever be in that good shape again, to be honest.
TFAW.com: The end of the web series left a lot of room for a sequel–is anything currently in the works?
FD: Nothing planned now, but Tallis is, awesomely, a part of the Dragon Age universe. I could only hope she appears again!
TFAW.com: What were the biggest differences (besides budget) between producing The Guild andDragon Age: Redemption?
FD: I think scale was the biggest, we had so many more crew on Dragon Age, it was hard to even look at it like a web series; it was TV-sized. Also Dragon Age had a huge post-production process with special effects and color timing and transcoding, etc. etc. That was a huge learning lesson, how complicated post-production can be when you do a lot of special effects and involve so many people on that end of production.
I think the biggest lesson I took was that I kind of enjoy shooting things with three people more, haha.
TFAW.com: You’ve acted in projects by others, and those you produce yourself. When you’re creating your own material, do you think you make fewer compromises, or just different ones?
FD: Filmmaking is, by definition, a compromise art form, I think, whatever the scale. You never quite realize exactly what is in your head–sometimes you fall short, sometimes other people’s input and talent help you exceed it. That’s the beauty and the frustration of making films.
I certainly have a bit more control over what I produce personally, but wearing so many hats tends to round out the perfectionist corners because it’s simply a lot to take on, especially when we have such low budgets. So really, the challenges always vary from project to project, which is why I love what I do. Variety I what I live for.
TFAW.com: What do you think is the key to creating realistic female characters, both in comics or for web or TV series?
FD: I think creating a character, not a type. We all read characters that jump out as, “MOM,” “GIRLFRIEND,” “GEEK GIRL”–they start from cliches and never overcome them. Moms aren’t always kind, teen daughters aren’t always rebellious. Start creating a character with a unique perspective, interesting past experiences, and then make her female. Then something awesome will hopefully happen.
Our thanks to Felicia for taking the time to answer all of our questions. Make sure to order The Guildcomics and graphic novels here at TFAW.com.
Original Interview at TFAW
Miracle Laurie’s Music Video Playlist from Examiner
Exclusive: Miracle Laurie’s music video playlist
Timothy Cox, Music Video Examiner
November 21, 2011
You may not recognize the name, but 30-year-old Miracle Laurie is forever in the hearts of Joss Whedon fans for her time as Mellie/November/Madeline (you’d have to watch the show to understand) in FOX’s short-lived television series Dollhouse. She’s also recognizable as Elizabeth Chivers in the web series Goodnight Burbank, which will continue as a television series in the future.
Odds are if you haven’t heard of Laurie by now, then you will next year. Next month she begins filming on Lust For Love with many other Dollhouse stars, including Fran Kranz, Enver Gjokaj, Dichen Lachman, and Maurissa Tancharoen.
Laurie’s wrapped filming on 100,000 Zombie Heads, a project that there’s not much information about. She will appear in next year’s Any Day Now, a movie about the true story of a gay couple who take in an abandoned teenager with Down Syndrome before authorities take the boy away out of discrimination. She’s also in The First Ride of Wyatt Earp, a Western film starring Val Kilmer, that’s scheduled to premiere March 30.
Miracle Laurie has provided Examiner.com with her 10 favorite music videos of all time. Her picks have been influenced by her interests in pop, humor, and an eye for beautiful visual entertainment.
Here at Examiner, we don’t know how Laurie found the time to type up a music video playlist, but we’re glad she did. We think you’ll agree that she’s a very fun and personable writer.
1. Soundgarden – “Black Hole Sun”
“The song is incredible (and I actually just loaded it onto my iPod the other day), but the video BLEW MY MIND…I think it blew a lot of people’s minds. I just remember thinking that I had never seen anything like it. And obviously, after 17 years for something to stick, it had to be significant.”
2. Michael Jackson – “Remember The Time”
“Michael is on here a couple times because not only was he the king of pop, but he REALLY used the medium of music videos to make little 10-13 minute movies…for every song he did even if the song itself was only 3 1/2 minutes. haha. He was brilliant and fun and a fantastic showman and really got what it was to be an entertainer. This particular video just cracks me up though, and my sister and I spent many an afternoon singing and dancing along and quoting some of the lines from this video.”
3. Michael Jackson – “Thriller”
“Since we’re already here, I mean MJ was absolutely amazing. A genius and pioneer for so many things. The whole thriller experience when the ‘making of’ came out and whenever the video was on, I just thought, ‘WOW…it’s all so fascinating and fabulous!’ The little actor kid in me loved every aspect of it and I couldn’t wait to be a part of that kind of magic.
~side note: I realized that every MJ Video could be on here because they were all epically fantastic. Honorable mentions: ‘Smooth Criminal‘ and ‘Scream‘ with Janet.”
“This song is perfect in my eyes and the video completely reflects what the song is about. It’s cinematic and has a strong point and has stayed in my mind all this time.”
“Three words: Bumble Bee Girl. 🙂 Incredibley sweet video and message, beautifully shot with a beautiful little girl.”
6. Beyoncé – “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)”
“To be honest, I don’t really like this song at all. haha, BUT the video is so distinct and was parodied like crazy, it would have been impossible for someone not to remember this video. And quite frankly, upon another watch, Beyonce’s fierceness and dancing and attitude really are something to be in awe of. She’s a wonderfully strong and beautiful woman and that’s admirable. Another reason this video is dear to me a little bit is because one of our prop guys during Season 2 of Dollhouse knew the entire video and used to sing and dance the whole thing for us. It was hysterical.”
7. Dave Matthews Band – “Crash Into Me”
“First let me admit that I am a HUGE DMB fan…like hard core, so I love pretty much anything they do. The video itself is actually quite interesting. Aesthetically, they have a lot of beautiful things going on and a good variety of shots and angles and colors and textures…the whole thing is just lovely and flowing. Secret confession: A dream of mine is to one day be “the girl” in a DMB video. I think that would be a whole new level of awesomeness for me. LOL.
“Honorable mention for DMB: ‘Ants Marching‘ – I LOVE that song and I love how they always have a very clear vision of the message they want to send with their videos. I also think it’s just a great video to go with a great song. AND this video pretty much put them on the map for the general public. (Side note, I just realized upon a re-watch, that ‘Alex’ from Grey’s Anatomy is in this video…hilarious).”
8. En Vogue – “Free Your Mind”
“For some reason ‘Free Your Mind’ by En Vogue stands out in my memory. It’s probably for no other reason than I just LOVED that song and loved to sing along to it. And I loved watching all those women rock the hell out of that runway and just be the beautiful, strong, fun, talented women they are.”
9. New Kids On The Block – “You Got It (The Right Stuff)”
“Why? Because I was a kid of the 80’s and in love with them. I don’t have a better reason other than it still makes me happy to think about them and that time. haha.”
10. Jamiroquai – “Virtual Insanity”
“I think Jamiroquai was fun and kinda crazy, and again…when the video came out I thought, ‘wow – I’ve never seen anything like that.’ 🙂 It’s a fun song and I think with music videos in general why not be creative and make the most of the incredible medium and showcase it is for your music.”
On top of acting, Laurie also has a ukulele cover band with her husband, called Uke Box Heroes. You can watch Laurie and her husband perform on YouTube by clicking here.
Follow Miracle Laurie on Twitter.
Original Interview at Examiner
Miracle Laurie Cast in Lust For Love
Miracle Laurie joins the cast of Lust for Love, made up largely of fellow Dollhouse cast members. Also joining the team are Shawna Trpcic as costume designer and Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen are providing some songs for the soundtrack. The movie has well exceeded it’s target funding of $70,000 and is currently in pre-production.
Source: Lust for Love Kickstarter Page
Felicia Day Q & A from The L.A. Times
Q&A: Felicia Day, from ‘The Guild’ to ‘Dragon Age’
October 13, 2011
This week in Felicia Day news: Tuesday saw the premiere of “Dragon Age: Redemption,” a Web series the actress-writer created as an extension of the video game Dragon Age II, and Wednesday that of the downloadable Dragon Age II adventure Mark of the Assassin; both feature Day in the role of Tallis, an elf with killer skills — a skilled killer elf. On Thursday, the fifth-season finale of Day’s “The Guild,” the online comedy about online gaming that made her name, goes wide on the Web. (It has been an ambitious year for the series, with myriad celebrity cameos, a fully staged fan convention and a flying “dirigible boatmobile.”) I spoke to Day, who is also known for her work on “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer,” Joss Whedon’s Web musical “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” and the Syfy TV series “Eureka,” for a Times profile last month. Here is a Q&A cut of some of the rest of our conversation.
We began by talking about women and the Web.
Felicia Day: There was a really good blog the other day about the huge decrease in the number of women on staff and women show runners in TV. When I go to a Web video meeting and look around, at least half the show runners are women. And a lot are actors-cum-writers, who are frustrated with the situation of being a woman actor in Hollywood and have decided to create their own show. There’s definitely a higher proportion of women in Web series because, I guess the money’s not there. [Laughs.] I think it’s an outlet for people looking to create without waiting for someone to give them a permission slip.
You first wrote “The Guild” as a TV pilot.
FD: I did. I showed it around and got some compliments on my dialogue and my characters. People said, “You should write a spec script for whatever sitcom — you could get on staff.” I know a lot of writers and I knew that being a staff writer wasn’t really what I wanted to do. But [future “Guild” co-producer] Kim Evey, who was actually my first writing teacher — my only writing teacher, I did a sketch-writing class with her — had done a lot of Web video. She had a show called “Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show” that took off a little bit that she sold to Sony for distribution. And after she read “The Guild,” she said, “We should make this for the Web, because that’s where the people who you’re talking to are, not TV.”
You never felt that it was the lesser path?
FD: No, because it was so experimental at the time it was just like a challenge, like, “Let’s mount a play! Let’s make something!” We had all just been sitting around Hollywood waiting for someone to give us what we thought we wanted. I think that’s kind of inherent in this town; no matter where you are you always have this other higher goal you want to get to. It’s sort of an underlying dissatisfaction with life, and it creates a lot of bitter people. The idea of just taking the reins and doing something on our own was terrifying, but the decision to do it, with just what we had in our houses, was so exciting that it became a great creative focus. We were going to make it happen no matter what.
No matter what we needed we had to do it ourselves because we had no money to hire anyone. So I was the one who drove out to Sylmar because somebody on Freecycle wrote they had working electronics on their curb and I was, like, “Well, that would look cool in the background of this character.” And for the background of another character I was, like, “Well, I need a painting that’s iconic for her,” so I took a piece of wrapping paper and I used a Sharpie and I painted this vaguely graphic shape and hung it on the wall. Every single scene that first season was all found objects.
Were you worried about not making it too “insidery”? Of making it for a wider audience than just gamers?
FD: I made it for myself, basically. I never wondered “Is this too insidery?” Season One is probably the highest bar to entry as far as the gaming terminology. I think it started with hard-core people, and then people who knew the hard-core people told their other geeky friends, and then it broadened out to all Internet users. We released one episode a month, which is counterintuitive, but in fact was a huge advantage for the show because we built an audience between episodes. We started so far inside that it gave me the time to think about where my audience was.
Did you have any sort of public profile at the time?
FD: I’d been on “Buffy” — that is an amazing community, the Joss Whedon fans. So that was a little bit of a leg up. And then being able to target gaming blogs, and inevitably a couple featured it. And with Episode Three, I think, YouTube saw the traffic and featured us on their front page. After that we had a lot of offers from studios — there were some big studios jumping into the space in 2007 and 2008, but their traditional model is to own the show’s IP, and I looked at what they were doing with other Web properties, and was like, “Well,what exactly are you going to do that’s better than what I’m doing?” I kept turning down deals, even partial ownership deals with really impressive people, though I got close several times, because in my mind I was doing things slowly but surely, and I didn’t see that they were going to help me out either logistically or financially enough to justify giving up my show. And the week before we started shooting Season Two, Microsoft called and said: “We’re interested in doing this with you. It works with our demographic. We want to do original content, we don’t need to own the IP, and we have Sprint on board to do overall sponsorship.” It was absolutely a dream deal — they introduced us to millions of new people. That was the big lesson, in that with every platform you’re on you’ll find a new audience. We experienced another huge leap when we got on Netflix, which I didn’t expect; and continue to find new audience there as well as on Xbox Live. We just did a distribution deal with Hulu, and again, tons more people just discovered the show.
Do your actors work under union contracts?
Since our first season we’ve been AFTRA. SAG and AFTRA have been pretty aggressive in trying to sign Web series. I guess the challenging part for them is how do you treat a Web series people are making in their house differently from a big company doing a quote-unquote Web series that’s really a direct-to-DVD movie they just want to pay everybody less for. I’ve done a couple of pilots for real networks that have been made under a Web agreement and made, like, $100, yet they’re presenting it to a network to consider for pickup: That’s the company trying to get over the unions. I think more and more the unions are savvy to those plays.
Codex, your character in “The Guild,” is a bit of a shy flower. For “Dragon Age: Redemption” you’ve written yourself as an elf assassin.
FD: I saw all these superhero movies and I knew I would never be that; I could be the waitress that gets killed in one of those superhero movies. And so when the opportunity came to create a character for a world where I could wield daggers, I couldn’t pass it up.
How did it feel?
FD: It felt great. It was a monumental opportunity, but it was definitely taking “The Guild” and raising it ten-thousandfold. I mean, I wrote a $10-million movie on the page, and they were, like, “Well, you should not write a fight sequence for 14 people on a Web series budget, when you have no trailers.” I called in every favor from every person I could to make it more than what I had resource-wise.
You were approached to make the series?
FD: I had been approached by a lot of people to do another Web series; it was almost intimidating how many people wanted me to do a project with them, and so I kind of put them all off. Because to me it’s all about, “Does it feel right?” Whenever I get out of my own way and make decisions based on my gut feeling I always do well. And when Electric Arts [makers of Dragon Age] called, that was the first call in years that was really like, “Oh!” They asked, “What would you like to do?” and I said, “What properties do you have?” And when Dragon Age came up I was, like, “Yes!” Because when am I ever going to be able to be in a medieval world as an actor? Probably never. So I’ll help create it myself.
This will be the first time that a video game property is a Web series; and the elf is an actual playable character. So my character will be a DLC [downloadable content] piece; if people own Dragon Age II, they’ll be able to purchase an extension pack and play with my character. It’s full motion capture with me, full facial capture, full vocal acting. It’s pretty much the coolest thing I could ever imagine: Not only am I in a game, but it’s as a character I created.
Have you noticed narrative ideas from video games working their way into movies and TV shows?
FD: I would almost say the opposite: The storytelling in video games has gotten so much more sophisticated and well-thought-out — I mean, if you play Uncharted, it’s like you’re living an Indiana Jones movie. And [Dragon Age developer] BioWare games specifically have a depth of storytelling where you feel like you’re living a season of a really good hour drama. You’re able to form relationships with other characters, your dialogue choices influence the story. Just the number of lines that I had to record to satisfy all the player decisions in [“Dragon Age: Redemption”] is kind of staggering. So it’s a three-dimensional kind of storytelling that to me is almost more attractive than passively watching a narrative. I think that’ it’s going to be very interesting to see the long term of it — it’s almost like video games have an advantage over movies in being able to go beyond the traditional barriers of media.
Do you see Web series remaining entrepreneurial as more money flows to the Web?
FD: When someone asks me to help them with their Web series, I’m like, “Do you really want to do a Web series, or do you just want to to a short film? Because if you want to do a short film, make one.” Sustaining an audience with a Web series is an impossible task. You’re starting a company and the video is just one piece of your offering. You have to have a start-up mind, you have to think about the Web design, the trailers, your social networking sites; you need to make sure that you’re consistent, you need to have marketing materials at all times. The three-dimensional way that you have to build a Web series is unique. Some people upload a video and expect to get reviews overnight. “The Guild” didn’t have that. Maybe a couple of stars will have that kind of penetration, but big stars have done Web series that have gotten zero people to watch them. There’s no magic bullet; it’s just persistence and making content over and over again and knowing that you love doing it even if you might not get a million people to watch.
You have to hit harder in order to be able to be spread on the Internet, because you’re not going to hit 2 million people at once like you’re on television. You’re going to hit … whoever you can get access to. Distribution networks like YouTube and Twitter and Facebook, that’s your network. I tweet — I don’t think 100% of my Twitter followers see every tweet I do. It’s a scattered, I like to say, “info-collander”: You pour in the information and it’s going to catch just between the holes. So it’s all about consistence and consistency. It’s challenging for the traditional sort of marketing approach; we invent whatever we can to get our audience.
Do you watch other Web series?
FD: I do. I mean, I try. The last six months have been really challenging to me. But one of my best friends I found online because I admired their work. There was that steampunk series “Riese” and there was a sci-fi series, “The Mercury Men,” my friend did and then sold to Syfy for distribution. There’s a really sweet comedy called “Awkward Embraces.” Especially on the comedy side, there are some really good Web series, and they get more and more polished because the equipment gets cheaper and cheaper and people get savvier and savvier. The storytelling and production values are improving. Certainly Episode One of Season One of “The Guild” is completely different from Episode One of Season Five. We’ve improved exponentially. You’ve got to compete with that Hulu thumbnail of a professional TV show; so you’d better make your Web series pretty good, or who’s going to click on it?
Do you imagine creating series that you don’t star in?
FD: “Dragon Age” was the first step. I could go off into the wilderness and write fantasy novels for the rest of my life and probably be happy; but I always want to challenge myself. So my producing partner Kim and I have several projects in development; a couple of them might have me as an actor, or personality, and others have other people. My goal is to do a whole slate of programs, start small and then end up at those bigger-budget things I really want to do. I also know that as a woman [actor], my face has a shelf life, in a sense, I’m very aware of that. So I just have to be long term about it, and think, you know, that was the time for that and maybe in the future it’s more writing and producing. I tend to not to think too far ahead.
This will all be online?
FD: Yes. I’m always interested in digital distribution — that’s where it’s all going to end up anyway. I never felt more fulfilled than when I uploaded that first “Guild” video and I saw comments starting to appear; and they were good and they were bad but they were there, and I saw that feedback and I saw people that started using our icons on their page because they liked the show. It’s that interactivity that keeps me interested in doing it; it’s intoxicating in a way. And I always wanted to be part of that community, and the community I’ve formed I’m loyal to. So I want to tell stories to them.
Original Interview at The L.A. Times
Joss Whedon Talks Much Ado About Nothing with EW
Joss Whedon on his secret film of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’: ‘This is the best vacation I’ve ever taken — EXCLUSIVE
by Adam B. Vary
After wrapping production on Marvel Studios’ gargantuan summer tent-pole The Avengers, writer-director Joss Whedon was supposed to go on a monthlong vacation with his wife, Kai Cole. Instead, Whedon tells EW exclusively that his wife suggested he finally make the feature film version of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing he’d been ruminating over for years.
And so he did — adapting the script, casting the film with Whedonverse alums like Nathan Fillion, Amy Acker (Angel), Alexis Denisof (Buffy, Angel), and Sean Maher (Firefly), and shooting the self-funded, black-and-white indie in secret over 12 days at his Santa Monica, Calif., home. (Production wrapped on Sunday, and Whedon says it will be ready for spring 2012 film festivals.) How did Whedon pull all this off? What was it about this particular Shakespeare comedy that drew him in? And what did stars Sean Maher — who plays the fiendish villain Don John — and Amy Acker — who co-stars with Denisof as the sarcastic, talky couple at the center of the play — make of all of this ado about Much Ado? Check out EW’s exclusive Q&As with Whedon, Maher, and Acker below, as well as exclusive shots of Maher, Denisof and Acker from the film:
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This announcement took people by surprise to say the least. How did this all come together?
JOSS WHEDON: Well, it’s not a bit secret that I’ve done these [Shakespeare] readings before, and I always had a vague notion of shooting Much Ado. But I didn’t really have a take on it. And then, for some reason, I kinda sorta did. As we were finishing The Avengers in New York, my wife and I were planning our vacation for our 20th anniversary. And she said, “Let’s not take the vacation. Make a movie instead.” I was like, “I’m not even sure if I can adapt the script, cast the movie, and prep it in a month.” And she was like, “Well, that’s your vacation time, so you do it.” And so I did.
So how did you get the ability to bend time and space to your will to be able to pull this off? It’s not like you don’t have a bunch of other things going on.
[Chuckles] You know, I am busy. But you know, if you want something done, ask the busy man; nobody else has time. There is an element of “I have a serious problem” — that’s one thing. And then there’s an element of this is the best vacation I’ve ever taken. I mean, yes, it was super hard, it was a ton of work, and there were moments where I went, “What’s wrong with me? What am I thinking about? I need to rest!” But I’ve never been so well rested and so well fed as I have on this movie. You know, you make the time, because no one’s going to make it for you. There’s never going to be a good time to do it. You make the time and you make it work if you really, really want it. And I really did.
You shot this at your home, I understand?
Yes. One of the advantages of Much Ado is it all takes place on Leonato’s estate. It’s all one location. I don’t have an estate. I have a nice house.
Like Dr. Horrible, did you bankroll this yourself?
I did. My wife and I started a micro studio, Bellwether Pictures, in order to do things like this, creator-controlled small fare.
What is it about Shakespeare that you love so much, especially this play? My understanding is one of the strange things about Much Ado is it’s one of his few plays that’s predominantly in prose, and not poetry.
I didn’t even notice that until Alexis pointed it out. But that actually proved useful for is. It wasn’t why I chose it, but I do think it’s one of the reasons why I love it. It’s very modern. The language, the jokes, and the attitudes translate really, really easily. [The actors] do say the words as they’re written [in the play], but they connect to a modern audience in a way that portions of the other comedies don’t necessarily.
Was this one of the plays you’d done readings of at your home?
Yeah, we’d done a reading of it starring Amy and Alexis years ago, and that’s when I knew that if I could ever do it, I would do it with them.
You said earlier that you hadn’t had a take on it until you were in the middle of shooting Avengers. What is your take on this? What did you end up wanting to do with this film?
I had trouble at first, because it had the words “About Nothing” in the title. So I was like, “I don’t have anything to say about nothing.” But really when I started pouring over it, I got a very strong sense of how a little bit dark and twisted it is. The movie’s in black-and-white partially because it’s kind of a noir comedy. I realized that everybody in it behaves like such a dolt — an articulate dolt, but a dolt. I fixated on this notion that our ideas of romantic love are created for us by the society around us, and then escape from that is grown-up love, is marriage, is mature love, to escape the ideals of love that we’re supposed to follow. So that clicked for me when I realized, oh, I get why it matters everybody goes through the weird machinations we go through.
Have there been any nibbles of interest in distribution today?
I haven’t heard anything yet. I’ve just been enjoying the Internet response. We’re feeling our way on this one, just like Dr. Horrible. I do mean it to be in theaters. But we haven’t gotten any real plan except [going to] film festivals because it sounded like it would be festive.
Finally, how did you keep this a secret? A lot of your cast are Twitter addicts, especially Nathan, and you’re not Mr. Low Profile right now.
Well, I asked the cast specifically and everybody involved not to say anything until we wrapped. And, you know, it all happened very, very fast. That’s how you know. When it’s something that fast, you actually have a shot. When something’s rolling around for three years, it’s harder. This film was a month from inception to production, and then 12 days to shoot. Even Nathan did not tweet for that long.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How’d you guys keep this film a secret?
SEAN MAHER: I think everyone was on board, just waiting for him to give us the go, so we could talk about it. After your article came out [about me coming out of the closet], I was doing tons of press, so I had asked him specifically if I could talk about the movie, and he said, Not yet. I would never in a million years betray his trust like that, and I think that everybody felt the same. It was such a magical experience because everybody that was there just wanted to be there, you know, with every part of their soul and heart. It was really a wonderful experience, and I don’t think anybody would have leaked it anywhere.
It’s totally fun that you guys keep this stuff secret.
Nathan and I hadn’t seen each other in forever, so we’re taking pictures left and right on our phones. And Tom Lenk and I haven’t worked together in awhile either. Last time I was at Joss’ house, [Buffy scribe] Jane Espenson had taken a Golden Girls episode and made it The Golden Boys. Tom did that, and I came and did that for Jane. That was the last time I was at Joss’ house, so Tom and I and Nathan and I are all taking our pictures on our phones. Joss was like, “Don’t you dare tweet that! Not yet!”
Tell me, how did this come together? How did Joss pitch this to you? How did he convince you to do it?
I was in Chicago at the time. It was like 2 or 2:30 in the morning, and I was arriving back to my hotel from work. I had an email from Joss, telling me that he was putting together a cast for Much Ado About Nothing, and he wanted me to come play Don John. He said, “I need a sexy villain, what sayeth you?” I initially was terrified because I’ve never done Shakespeare, and Shakespeare with Joss — I always want to do right by him because I love him so much. So I told him, I’m absolutely on board, let me just make sure I can clear the dates. I spoke to my manager, he called Playboy Club. Ironically, we got some time off from Playboy Club, and the day I started rehearsal on Much Ado About Nothing, the show got canceled. It was a little bittersweet, but look, anything that Joss would ask me to come do, I’m pretty confident I would do. It was a no-brainer on my part. It still was scary for me. It was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done, but yet, it didn’t feel like work.
What about it was so challenging?
That it was Shakespeare! Shakespeare, to do it right, is not easy at all. I think in this instance, because we were shooting it in such a short period of time, we all had to come to work completely prepared, know all of our words, know the ins and outs of the play. There wasn’t a lot of time for multiple takes. There wasn’t a lot of time for many set-ups, in terms of camera angles. He was sort of getting in there and filming a live performance, which was exhilarating and scary at the same time. I mean, it was incredibly challenging, yet it didn’t feel like work, as well.
Well, and you were with the Whedon alums — what a great group to work with, right?
Some of them I hadn’t met at all. And obviously, others I was overjoyed to be able to spend some time with again, like Amy Acker and Nathan — our lives get so busy that we hardly get to see each other. It’s just such a gift to get to come together and work on something we love for him. Then, of course, there’s the handful of actors I knew had worked with Joss, but I had never worked with before.
Is playing a villain a new thing for you?
Completely new. And I said that to Joss! Last night, we were wrapping up my last scene. I was just having so much fun playing this role. He’s just deliciously mean, trying to thwart his brother’s happiness and foil the wedding in the play. We had finished a take, and I walked off and I was sort of sitting there smirking with Joss, and he’s like, “You’re such a dick.” It’s so much fun to be a dick because I’ve never been a dick! He’s like, “Are you kidding me? You do dick well.” I was like, “No, it’s the first time.” He’s smart, he’s not just mean. He’s setting up all of these misunderstandings and planting all of these seeds of deception, and he’s just so mischievous, but in such a calculated, intelligent way. That was really, really fun to play.
How is this updated? What’s the vibe like of the movie?
It does feel contemporary. The direction we were getting from Joss was to make it was real, especially with the language, not to be big and Shakespearian, but to bring it in and be intimate and bring it as close to a realistic way of speaking as we could. And Joss’ house is just magnificent. Not ostentatious by any means, but just a maze of halls and so many different bedrooms and this pool that overlooks the Santa Monica mountains. It’s gorgeous, just the most perfect setting. Everybody who was there, so desperately wanted to be there and you felt that. It really felt like we were doing something great. So I’m excited.
Interview by Tanner Stransky
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Joss told me he had done a reading of the play with you and Alexis. Do you remember when that was?
AMY ACKER: I feel like it was maybe three years ago? Somewhere around that time.
And he’s been doing these for a while?
Yeah, since even before I met him. When I came on to Angel, which was a long time ago, he had already been doing them for awhile. For several years we would do, like, them every month, and then we’ll go three years and not do one. Then he would bring everybody back and kind of get on a roll with it again. There’s usually a group of people whose always there, and then he picks up new people each time.
When did you get the call that he’d be doing Much Ado About Nothing as a film?
I think it was about three weeks before we started. Maybe two-and-a-half. I know when Clark Gregg decided that he was going to do it, there had been some other people who were maybe going to play that part, and then they had conflicts that came up, so he kind of came in and saved the day at the end. He was like, “Well I only had four days to learn all of the lines,” and I was like, “Yeah, we all found out last week, so don’t feel too bad.” [Laughs]
Do you know who was going to be playing Leonato before Clark?
Anthony Head.
What went through your head when you got the call. That was the end of September?
Yeah, right towards the end of September. I mean, first of all I was like, “Sure, that sounds awesome!” Alexis and I met with Joss maybe one or two times right after we decided that we were doing it, and then we rehearsed kind of the week before. But when we showed up the first day, I was like, “Oh, this is a real movie!” We didn’t quite know what it was going to be, and seeing all of the trucks and the lights and everything, everyone was kind of like, “Oh, we really are doing a movie!”
How did Joss explain keeping this a secret?
Well, he basically just said, “We’re not going to tell anyone until we finish.” Luckily since everyone was scrambling to learn their lines and figure out what the heck they were doing, no one really had time. I think it was mostly making sure Nathan didn’t tweet about it. That’s how all news in the world seems to spread. [Laughs]
What were those 12 days like? Anything really stick out?
Oh geez, the whole thing was really awesome. I mean, it was all my favorite people, so we were all just hanging out in their amazing house, and we just kind of had to keep reminding ourselves that, “Oh wait, we’re actually working!” It just kind of felt like a big 12-day party.
What was the look of the film? How did it all look?
The costume designer went shopping in all of our closets, and she just sort of chose. We are all wearing our own clothes, and then she kind of added little pieces here and there.
Did you conclude filming yesterday? The website is already up…
Yeah. I think they had [the site] ready on Saturday, when we were shooting. From what it looks like, I wasn’t actually filming at the end of the day yesterday, so I wasn’t there, but it seems like they must have posted it the second they wrapped the film.
Why do you think Joss did this film, and did it so quickly?
I thought it was just because he was super cool. I think his wife and him were going to Italy for a vacation, and then she was kind of like, “Why don’t you just shoot that movie you’ve been wanting to do instead?” So, that’s sort of why it happened now. She’s kind of just really amazing. She built the house that it shot in. You know, she just kind of makes stuff happen. If Kai says something, then she like, actually does it every time.
Wait, Kai designed the house?
Yeah, she’s an architect. She built it and designed it and decorated it and everything. Pretty much you could just film the house without all of us talking in it, and it would be a really great movie.
What kind of style?
I’m not sure if it’s from France or Italy, but everything is old and warm and it’s just the most welcoming place ever.
(Shaunna Murphy contributed to this report)
Follow Adam on Twitter @adambvary
Original Interview at Entertainment Weekly
Lust for Love Kickstarter Project ft a Host of Whedony Actors
Lust for Love is a feature film project by a group of artists including Fran Kranz, Dichen Lachman, Enver Gjokaj, Felicia Day and Maurissa Tancharoen. The Kickstarter fund for the project, which will film in December has already reached it’s goal of $70,000 but you can still donate to help make the film even better and receive a number of different rewards depending on how much you pledge.
For full details and to make your donation go to Kickstarter
Felicia Day: Queen of the Geeks from Paste Magazine
FELICIA DAY
QUEEN OF THE GEEKS
By Josh Jackson
Felicia Day knows she only has herself to blame for this schedule. When videogame company BioWare approached her with the idea to make a couple of webisodes to supplement its launch of some new downloadable content for Dragon Age II, she wrote, produced and starred in an ambitious six-episode adventures – nearly an hour’s worth of television. But she learned quickly that creating a fantasy action-adventure series was very different than her low-budget, highly successful comedy show, The Guild.
“I said, ‘Let’s mae a huge, epic web series on almost no money,’ and I underestimated not only the work of managing the production on two huge properties” she recalls over breakfast in West Hollywood, “but also as a person – being able to act and produce and write and have everything on my shoulders and being the face of it, and then also being full-time on a TV series, SyFy’s Eureka. It was a very tough year.”
But the 32-year-old actress knew that she wasn’t going to get cast as an action hero in a blockbuster film, and this was her chance to create that role for herself. She took more than three months of fight training, transforming from “gamer shape” into someone who showed off her muscles on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. “That will never exist again, that gun,” she jokes. “It’s like being naked on film: you want to preserve that for eternity. That’s my version of naked. Like, ‘You have biceps.'”
When Day speaks of 18-hour days, it wasn’t just learning how to portray a deadly elf assassin. She was determined to make sure her story fit well inside an existing universe to please a much broader audience to justify the huge budgets. But here was an opportunity to make something for the existing fans. She’d already been a fan of Dragon Age: Origins, played the game over and over for months, reading every forum post and internal document, including the plot of the then-unreleased game.
“I used a lot of subtle videogame tropes in the piece,” she says, “because I wanted Dragon Age fans to know that I didn’t just take this and ignore what they love about the game. In fact I researched so much that the creators of the game were like, ‘Oh, we hadn’t though of that’ and ‘You know this more than people that work here.’ I’m not being arrogant about it, but you can’t take a videogame world and try to just whitewash it so that everybody will love it. The point of a videogame world is that you spend 40 hours in it, so people who love that world know it better than they’ll ever know a movie. To betray basic facts about a videogame is to betray its fan base even more than a redoing of a movie or a TV show.”
Day doesn’t do anything half-assed. When she took up violin, she practiced enough to earn a full scholarship to the University of Texas – at age 16. She majored in math, with no intentions of doing anything with the degree other than showing her dad, but she loved the coursework, graduation as valedictorian. “I was doing calculus at [age] 12, and it wasn’t like I was some kind of savant; I was interested in the subject and I had people teach me as far as I could go.”
Day speaks quickly, as if her mind is racing, and her mouth is just doing the best to keep up. But while she excelled at math and violin, she didn’t love the predictability that came with either career path. So at age 20, she headed west to pursue acting. “I always had this blind idea that I was going to go to L.A. and be an actor, and it was unfounded in a lot of ways. But I think there are a lot of people who arrive in this town just thinking that’s what they want to do and it’s their destiny – or righteousness or arrogance, of course. And then when you get here, you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s not going to be easy.’ But you know from Austin, Texas, a girl who did like two or three student films, I thought I was perfectly qualified.”
For two years, she worked without an agent, experiencing constant rejection and acting in “horrible student films.” The turning point came when she took an improv class. “I didn’t know I was funny,” she says. “I didn’t know about humor. I was actually very inhibited and very straight-laced. And I think it was that first improv class where I got out of my head, and I started acting without my brain getting involved, and I realized there was stuff you didn’t have to control about yourself that is unique and can make people laugh. And then when I started doing that, I became a lot more comfortable acting and auditioning, and I got a little more work. But it wasn’t until I started making myself look like more of a character that I started getting more and more roles, like put the glasses on and the short quirky hair and sort of fit what Hollywood saw in me, which is great but it ultimately felt unfulfilling. And that’s why I kind of delved into World of Warcraft ,” she adds, laughing. “Full time job.”
Videogames had always been a big part of Day’s life growing up. A military brat, she moved around a lot, and she would escape with her brother into the games on their Amiga system or hand-me down computers from their nuclear-physicist grandfather. She became particularly enamored with King’s Quest and the Ultima series and every role-playing game that followed. In fact, she only bristles when her videogame bona fides are called into question. “That’s the biggest insult when I read Internet comments, which I really need to avoid. But when they say, ‘Oh, she’s just a poser gamer taking advantage of gamers,’ – you can say whatever you want about me, about my talent and my writing, but if you challenge the fact that I love games, I will come punch you.” She’s laughing as she says this, but all you internet trolls out there, remember those biceps.
Despite landing a recurring role on the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2003, work was sporadic and the process frustrating. Acting, it turned out, was a far cry from the hard work/reward cycle of the violin or her math studies – or World of Warcraft.
“[I was] so tied to achievement based things,” she says, “especially things where the more work you put in them, the more you were rewarded. So, violin, the more you practice, the better you are. The more you do math, the better you are. The more you study, the better you are. And then I got into a world in L.A. that for whatever rhyme or reason, you’re talking about something you can’t measure. In fact, the more you work at it, as an actor especially, has absolutely no reflection on your achievement level. It’s not merit based. [With] World of Warcraft, when I get in there, the harder you work, the better you are.”
Her gaming obsession became unhealthy, but even her in-game efforts eventually paid off in a very different way. After quitting cold turkey, she gave herself a deadline to finish writing a script for a TV pilot, based on a girl obsessed with gaming. “I was filled with fear,” she recalls. “I didn’t know what was going to happen. But as soon as I allowed myself to sort of write and fail – you know just write it for myself – that was where I finally finished the script at midnight on January 1st, because literally, that was my deadline.”
She pitched the show as a half-hour sitcom to a few networks and producers, but no one understood the size of the gaming audience. “They were like, ‘Oh yeah, there’s some really great stuff here, there’s some really great characters, but I don’t know what the hell is going on,'” she told me back in 2009, just after releasing the second season of The Guild “Even then, people didn’t understand. [They] thought, ‘Oh you know, maybe she gamed before and now she has a boyfriend and she works at a coffee shop.'”
Undeterred, she followed the lead of her friend Kim Evey, who had a viral video hit with Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, and took her script where most of her audience was anyway – online. Breaking the half-hour pilot into short segments for the web, Day and Evey produced the series themselves under the Knights of Good Productions banner, getting actors and crew to volunteer their time and paying for things like set design out of their own pockets. When they began releasing the short webisodes, Day discovered that there was indeed a part of her new career which followed that familiar work/reward cycle. She poured herself into promotion.
She began emailing gaming bloggers, personally, repeatedly, fanatically, 12 hours a day. She says they got 200,000 hits on the first episode, double that on the second, and the third was featured on YouTube. One of the show’s early fans was Buffy creator Joss Whedon. During the writer strike in 2007, he told her he was planning on doing something on the web himself. “We were walking around in a circle with our signs at the strike,” she remembers, “and he was like, ‘I want to make a superhero musical.’ So I was like, ‘That sounds amazing; please go do it.’ And then around the corner of the year, he just randomly sent me this email saying ‘Can you sing? – J.'”
That superhero musical turned out to be Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Whedon cast Day in a love triangle with Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion. If The Guild was an unprecedented success, Dr. Horrible was a phenomenon, with more tha two million viewers out of the gate. (To be fair The Guild has since surpassed million episode views over its five seasons).
Whedon managed to get sponsorship for his series, but Day and Evey simply put up a donation button and were shocked when money started trickling in. Between gifts from fans, DVD sales and a partnership with Microsoft’s Xbox, they were able to start paying cast and crew members while retaining full ownership and creative control. Day had the freedom to shoot a funny music video for her character Codex, called “Do You Want To Date My Avatar?” and even developed a series of comics with origin stories for each of the guild members through publisher Dark Horse.
For each season of The Guild, Day and Evey increased production values as the show got more ambitious. They do forum posts and little Easter egg videos at WatchTheGuild.com. Season 5 takes place at a sci-fi convention, and the cameos read like a marquee day at Comic Con – Erin Gray (Buck Rogers), Zachary Levi (Chuck), Eliza Dushku (Dollhouse), Kevin Sorbo (Hercules) and comic-book legend Stan Lee are but a few. While Day and Evey still work out of their homes, Knights of Good is currently developing a dozen projects right now, taking what they’ve learned and scaling it.
Day’s most ambitious project to date, though, is Dragon Age: Redemption. She’s brought her laptop to breakfast, to play me the first episode, and it’s a long way from the bedroom web-cam opening of The Guild. Where Cyd Sherman lacked an ounce of self-esteem, the assassin Tallis is more like Cyd’s avatar, Codex. She’s cocky and capable, a bad-ass in leather and steel. She’s also funny in the context of a serious adventure, where Cyd was straight-laced within the confines of a sitcom.
“If you’re familiar with BioWare games,” Day says, “you know that part of the charm of them is the characters are in tense situations, but they still have a sense of humor, like any human world. They have witty one-liners and amusing character interactions, and then they fight people and kill people. So I tried to, again, not only to be faithful to the world and the logic of the world, but be faithful to the tonality of Dragon Age… It’s almost Buffy-ish in a way – that’s what Joss Whedon does amazingly. He feels the dramatic stakes but humanizes the characters through their point of view and their humor.”
Tallis will also be making an appearance in the game itself. “I created a character,” she says, her face lighting up, “and the cool thing is the character goes into a piece of videogame content, which is kind of the first time that’s ever been done. When I do something that nobody has ever done before, that’s my personal victory. I don’t really go do Hollywood parties; I don’t get a lot of free things, except for video games, which is awesome. I do it for the self-challenge of it. Can I pull this off? And has it been done before? That’s the thing that I’m the most proud of, that I can open a door to something new and innovative. For some reason that’s what tickled my brain and makes it satisfied.”
Day hasn’t fully given up on old media. The Eureka creators wrote a character specifically for her in a recent eight-episode run, and she was contemplating writing another TV pilot when the folks at BioWare came calling. But she;s content with the smaller scope of web video if it comes with the opportunity to keep trying new things. Knights of Good is looking at bringing on more people, and with those dozen projects ranging from tiny budgets to ideas grander than her Dragon Age series, Day’s level of involvement will vary.
“I really believe in the space,” she says. “I pay my bills, and that’s all I need. I’m not really an extravagant person, so my life is fulfilled by creating things, and whether I’m working with a mainstream studio, or a Microsoft, or I’m just doing it in my house on my own, I believe in the web. [But] obviously, in order to scale and be a human who plays a little bit of video games at night, I can’t do everything anymore.”
Looking back, my first question to Day upon hitting “record” on my iPhone app turns out to have been a really silly one: “Did you know this was what you wanted to do when you were growing up?” I meant, “act, write and tell stories.” But this, the thing that Felicia Day does, didn’t exist when she was growing up, didn’t really exist until she started doing it. She went to L.A. because she wanted a career that was unpredictable, that didn’t have boundaries on where the next five years would take her. She’s certainly found it.
Original interview at Paste Magazine
Cider
Whedon's World 