The actors share the love of the show, the characters

At New York Comic-Con 2021, the first images of Critical role: the legend of Vox Machina made his debut in animation. Based on the web-series featuring actors Dungeons & Dragons, the cartoon quickly took shape after a record breaking Kickstarter, and Amazon picked it up later for two seasons. As with everything they do, the show’s cast has made it clear that this has only happened due to their huge fan base. “It is our show, in every sense of the word, ”said Travis Willingham (voiced by brute goliath Grog Strongjaw) on the NYCC sign.

It’s an interesting feeling for the actors, who have all spent their careers as characters from other properties. Laura Bailey and Willingham spent years as Marvel characters The Black Widow and Thor, you heard Matthew Mercer as Overwatch cowboy McCree, and players know Ashley Johnson intimately as The last of us’ zombie slayer Ellie. The chance to adapt their own material was therefore a kind of culture shock, that’s for sure. “Neither of us took this for granted at any time,” Johnson said (cleric gnome Pike). Liam O’Brien (half-elf thief Vax’ildan) added that there is a special amount of investment in being your own man. “You can’t really beat your fingers in your own character, and I feel more invested than I have in everything I’ve been a part of.”

Fans of critical role will be delighted that the series kicks off with the Briarwood arc of the first campaign, considered when the spectacle finds its place. In it, the group of adventurers known as the Vox Machina helps their inventor Percy (voiced by Talisen Jaffe) hunt down the vampires who slaughtered his family and quickly get over their heads. (Hot vampires, as the cast was quick to point out when they saw a photo of Silas Briarwood, voiced by Dungeon Master Mercer.) “When we got to the Briarwood Arch,” explained Sam Riegel (gnome bard Scanlan), “It clicked for all of us that we were telling a real story here … At least for me, this is the first time that it looks like art. Bailey (half-elf archer Vex’ahlia) felt that the Briarwood arc is where the relationships between the characters really took shape beyond the mess of the cast around and laugh at their own idiocy.

Adapting anything is tricky, but critical role is a whole different beast. The Vox campaign is hundreds of hours of content, and since the campaign ended in 2017, the cast has sporadically voiced their heroes intermittently for one-shots. Choosing which moments to bring to the campaign was not easy; Bailey explained that the cast was asked about favorite times, they wanted to move on to the animation. Or like Marisha Ray (Druid Keyleth) said to him: “The first day of the writers’ The play was basically the writers interviewing us as characters … it was just us trying to explain our characters. But the transition, according to Jaffe, wlike “better than I imagined”. If you are a fan of Vox campaign, you probably know what he’s talking about.

Critical role: the legend of Vox Machina arrives on Amazon on February 4, 2022.