With only its second season underway, Prime Video’s animated adult fantasy The Legend of Vox Machina is proving to be one of the streamer’s latest and fruitful ventures into the medium and geek culture-at-large.
Debuting in 2022, its critically acclaimed first season — largely funded through a kickstarer campaign and produced in partnership with Amazon Studios and Titmouse — arrived in the same year as a few other epic, sprawling fantasy TV series. Most notably His Dark Materials, The Sandman, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon. After garnering an early third season renewal and just five days after the show’s Jan. 20 second season premiere, Amazon Studios announced a multiyear exclusive overall television and first-look film deal with Critical Role.
The deal will see the studio and streamer further investing in animated series — on the heels of its success with Vox and Robert Kirkman’s Invincible — distributing a TV adaptation of the multimedia production company’s second successful campaign, Mighty Nein. That story follows a group of criminals and misfits who fight to prevent the kingdom from plunging into chaos after a reality-reshaping artifact falls into the wrong hands.
With season two of Vox Machina already underway — in an arc that pits the group against the Chroma Conclave, a sinister collection of dragons — The Hollywood Reporter spoke to executive producers, writers and voice actors Sam Riegel, Travis Willingham and Brandon Auman. The trio talk what they’re most excited about for season two, elevating animation amid TV’s fantasy wave, adapting an RPG for the small screen and why Amazon has proven to be a promising partner following a difficult year for animated TV properties.
Animation rarely gets talked about in the same way as big-budget live-action fantasy, but Legend of Vox Machina feels in the same big visuals, big drama realm of House of the Dragon or The Rings of Power. How do you feel like your show fits into that conversation of epic TV fantasy?
TRAVIS WILLINGHAM We played these stories in a tabletop setting originally, so it’s really a theater of the mind. You’re getting these visceral images in your head, and they might be the same as some other people have, or they might be slightly different. So when we were able to go to an animation team and see them manifest, the first question we asked was, “What are the limits of animation?” We found very quickly that it was expansive, maybe as unlimiteless as what’s available in live-action today. We found an amazing partner over in Titmouse that has the same sort of anime-leaning styles that we have, visceral action and high comedy beats. So where House of the Dragon and some of these other shows have really good talking-head drama and it holds tension very well, we really like to push the pace of the show; keep the action high, keep the humor high and keep people laughing. It’s why I fell in love with what the MCU did over the last 10 to 12 years. We found there were a lot of similarities between what we were doing in our storytelling and what those shows have to offer. It’s been great coming in in a half-hour format and being able to pack that full of characters with humor and unique personalities that I think people probably aren’t expecting from an adult animated series. It’s hard to put these characters in a box and also hard to nail down the tone of the show. It jumps between humor, action and serious drama very, very quickly.
SAM RIEGEL I think the reason that all this fantasy is coming to market at the same time is because the people making it and watching it all grew up either reading fantasy or seeing it in small pieces when a fantasy-type movie or television series like Xena would come out. But there wasn’t tons of it because it was really hard to make. Now with technology being what it is, and all of these people who grew up reading this stuff now being adults who want to consume it, it’s just way easier to make. Also, I think people are realizing that fantasy isn’t just one genre. There’s high-fantasy, there’s low-fantasy, but I think there are even more genres than that. There’s sci-fi fantasy and supernatural fantasy, and there’s our show. It’s not all one genre, so we have found a place within the fantasy umbrella that’s uniquely our own.
BRANDON AUMAN Fantasy wasn’t really successful before Lord of the Rings. With Xena on television, there was some success, but before that, you’ve got Dragon Slayer and a few movies that came out in the ’80s and ’90s. It didn’t really pop until Lord of the Rings. I feel like we’re very, very different from any other fantasy series that’s come before. We’ve got humor, but people can’t really call us a comedy fantasy because we also have dramatic elements. It’s so emotional and we ping pong back and forth between very serious high-fantasy to really goofy adult comedy. That’s what makes us so unique and why I think we stand out in the fantasy space.
Vox Machina is based on a series of DnD campaigns created by you and your fellow voice actors and EPs. You’re adapting storylines but it’s not a one-to-one match and not the same as adapting a book or comic. With season two out now and a third confirmed, how did you think about adapting your campaigns with so many years of material?
WILLINGHAM An RPG campaign is very much like an open sandbox video game. You can go basically anywhere you want to at anytime, and it’s the [game master’s] responsibility — our brilliant Matthew Mercer — to tie that all together and to be ready at any time to respond to what we want to do or where we want to go explore. The fun that we had was sitting in a room, throwing up all these big campaign beats, these character moments, the arcs and going, “OK, how do we make sense of this bowl of spaghetti and how can we realign things so that they work a little bit better?” Also, it’s not just a rehash of the book or the campaign. We want to do a little refresh in specific moments so that the fans of the show that know the campaign are kept on their toes.
We’re also keeping in mind that new people that are coming to the show are going to be seeing this for the very first time, so that delivery method can’t be too tongue-in-cheek. It can’t be made just for fans so that everything is inside baseball. We have to make it totally accessible to people that maybe have no idea what fantasy is. It’s been a long process where we know how it happened, fans know how it happened and as soon as we start moving things, there are ripples that affect the story as it goes. But we’ve had our own little war room meetings where we try and plot out episodes and seasons at a time and figure out how that all affects each other as we move things around.
AUMAN Those war rooms can last for months. We usually take a big chunk of time just trying to figure out what the season is going to be about thematically. How do we end the season? What if we don’t get another season? This could cap the season if we don’t get greenlit for a new season. It’s a difficult process but it’s very worthwhile. It’s so much fun working with these guys and the rest of the Critical Role team. We also want to surprise the fans as well. We don’t always want to adapt it exactly to the campaign. That’s what I think makes this series exciting. Nobody’s really done anything like this before — adapting an RPG campaign into a series. It was a challenge and it continues to be a challenge but it’s so much fun.
WILLINGHAM I’ll also say we had fun making our what-if lists. Like, “What if this happens in the story? What if this character does this?” Then there was also the casting what-ifs. What if we could get this person to be in this part? People like Lance Reddick, Henry Winkler — they’re all on that list of “They won’t say yes.” Then they say yes, and we just sit there and do a dance. (Laughs)
You were already voicing characters for Critical Role, making it easy to imagine fans got attached to them. So how did you think about voice casting for this series?
RIEGEL We’ve been playing this game for years and when we do, our game master, Matt, provides all the voices for all the other characters. He’s great at doing lots of different voices and painting a whole world with different accents and flavors of characters. He really established who these characters were and what their quirks were. But when we went to series, we knew that Matt couldn’t voice every other character. It would start to sound like just Matt a bunch of times. (Laughs) Which there’s nothing wrong with, but we wanted to make it feel like a real world that was really lived in. Like Travis said, we started making our our wish list of actors that we wanted to work with, but also actors that we thought had unique voices, expressive voices. It is animation, so not all on-camera actors are great at doing animation and voiceover stuff. We also wanted to find people who fans of Critical Role, the critters, would recognize. People who they’ve seen in movies and TV shows or in other animated projects.
So we threw out a wide net. We got some people who have been on the live-streaming show, other friends who are voice actors and incredible talents like Grey Griffin, Khary Payton. Then we brought in some new blood: Gina Torres, Stephanie Beatriz — people who haven’t done a ton of television animation, but who were fantastic and amazing and really embodied these characters. The cast that we were able to put together just at the beginning based on the story of how we made this show — telling them about the Kickstarter, telling them about the fan base — was so exciting, and they wanted to be a part of this even if they had never heard of it before. Now it’s much easier to get people to say yes to doing the show just because it’s out there and you can watch it.
There’s an ongoing discussion about hiring untrained live-action actors in voice work versus trained and established VAs. Where do you feel like you landed in terms of casting a recognizable name versus a storied voice actor for Vox?
RIEGEL Travis and I are voice actors and so are most of the executive producers of the show.
AUMAN Except for me.
WILLINGHAM Don’t sell yourself short, Brandon.
RIEGEL Brandon makes a little cameo. But we see both sides of this, right? As voice actors, we know that our fellow voice actors are so good and so talented, can knock it out of the park every single day. And we should hire them for everything all the time because it makes it easy and fun. They’re the best at this type of work. On the other hand, we are executive producers and we want people to be excited about the show. We want people to see a name and recognize it and be like, “Oh, I want to check out that show even though I have no interest in fantasy.” So there are benefits to both sides of it. Also, when you hire someone from the on-camera world — be they a big celebrity or a really cool character actor — there is a little added benefit because you know what you’re getting ahead of time. For a character that we’ve just invented for the show, for instance, yes, we could definitely hire a voice actor and sit there for an hour in the recording booth and say, “Alright, what should this guy sound like?” and figure it out together — that’s fun. Or we could cast someone who we already know what they sound like. We know exactly who Stephanie Beatriz is. She’s gonna come in and do Stephanie Beatriz and she’s gonna kill it. I think we’ve made a good strong mix of really talented voice actors, really talented on-camera actors, and it’s made a really rich world of voices, I hope.
Animation in the U.S. have historically been treated as a kids-focused medium, but this sits squarely in adult programming territory. Were there ever any conversations about it being aimed at children? And what does being targeted at an older demographic let you do creatively?
WILLINGHAM There was an early moment. A very natural and understood conversation and question arose of can we make this accessible to larger audiences if we tone down the profanity, if we make it available to a younger audience. That’s completely understandable, but the source material — the way that we played the campaigns, really the vibe of the friends that were around that table, which really comes through in the characters — that’s just us uncensored. That’s really the beauty of what tabletop gaming offers: that camaraderie, that unchecked filter. We try to replicate that in the dialogue, which means that there’s going to be profanity, there’s going to be adult situations, and there are going to be horrible reactions — awkward reactions to those adult situations like there are in real life. We knew that if we were going to make this the way that we really wanted to, we had to push for that adult show. We grew up on animation in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s — X-Men, He-Man, Voltron, Thundercats.
Then seeing brilliant animated series that are available to younger audiences like [Legend of] Korra and you know the Voltron [Legendary Defender] remake — things that have great storytelling, but are missing that edge of how a more adult audience reacts. There’s also just a more relatable adult story that can be told in reactions and understandings. I think even for younger audiences that find their way into the show that maybe shouldn’t (Laughs), there are a lot of things that we explore that I think can be revealing or interesting or just a good topic of conversation as you’re looking at new media. We really want to push the boundaries of what standard fantasy storytelling is. It doesn’t have to be one type of fantasy. It doesn’t have to live in strict verse or prose. We like to mix fantasy with modern comedy because that’s where the beauty is, in little nuggets of common speak or lingo just dropped in here and there to make it fresh and appealing. We knew if if it was gonna be representative of the show, at least for our fans, at the very minimum, it had to have the same kind of vibe as it was around our table.
One thing you do that kind of breaks the general, simpler mold of adult western animation and feels more in line with western children’s animation or eastern anime is your art style. Can you talk about why you chose it and your inspirations?
WILLINGHAM We talked about that exactly. A lot of adult animation where comedy is the focus, the design can sometimes be more simplified. There’s a trend, I think, where they tried to dumb it down into simpler shapes. The line count per drawing is easier. I’m sure the overseas studios that help are like, “Great. Easier to animate.” But we want to work for it. For Brandon, Sam and I, we love anime. We got our start dubbing anime. Doing that we were privy to a ton of shows like Fullmetal Alchemist, Fooly Cooly, Wolf’s Rain, Vampire Hunter D. The visceral action of those properties I think has influenced the entire world of animation. It came from the East, it came West and now there’s this beautiful hybrid.
We try and find studios that are inspired by those animated properties, but match it with a fusion of Western character design. Also take into account the body language of the characters, the representation of different physical sizes, a more diverse and representative view of Exandria, that’s something that we wanted to hit without it being too cartoony or simple. For me, it’s just refreshing to see it. It keeps it really, really interesting. So, [Legend of] Korra was a big inspiration for us. The Voltron [Legendary Defender] redesign was a big inspiration. That’s why we initially went to Phil Bourassa because I was coming off of Warner Bros. direct-to-video films, and I was just loving his characterization of some of these characters — sharp lines, powerful builds, dramatic in still frame. That was really, really attractive to us as we looked at these characters.
AUMAN Also our style can convey emotion in a way that comedy design would not be able to convey emotion. It’s just a beautiful world. Our series has to reflect that beauty.
The series is inclusive across a number of communities, which is something fantasy TV has leaned into more, to some praise and some attacks online. Why did Vox being inclusive make sense for your story and how did you think about it in everything from the art to writing?
RIEGEL Matt’s world is super diverse — the universe that we play our tabletop role-playing game in. But also, the world of tabletop role-playing games has expanded in recent years to be way more inclusive and diverse. It’s really a much cooler space to play in now than it used to be. We wanted to honor that in the show. Matt’s world that he created, the world of Exandria, represents all kinds of different people but also not people — different creatures and beings that are furry or fuzzy or tall or short or wide or thin, a broad spectrum of LGBTQ characters. From the casting, we wanted to represent a broad swath of backgrounds and diversities in the voice cast, but also in the art. We’ve told our artists and designers and board teams let’s mix up the characters in the scene so they’re not all 5-foot-10. Let’s put some different body shapes in there. With fantasy, you can do that all over the place in such interesting cool ways. We have an episode in season two, in the Slayer’s Take episode, there’s a band of rough-and-tumble badass mercenaries. One of them is in a wheelchair and they are super badass. That’s something that Matt did in the campaign a bit, so we definitely wanted to include all of that. The fans of Critical Role are super passionate about inclusivity and we are too, and it just wouldn’t be a Critical Role show if it was one type of person.
WILLINGHAM The cool area we were able to flex is that there are a ton of executive producers because that’s the cast, the people that made the stories, but it was my first time being in writers rooms and being able to pull in writers from all sorts of backgrounds and different views. It was great getting everyone’s take on these characters. There were people sometimes vaguely familiar with Critical Role and other times, people were coming to it for the very first time, watching episodes, reading the stories, coming in with new ideas, freshening up the story. There’s nothing better than throwing it at the wall and then moving it around again. Having people put their own stamps on it was refreshing and exciting, and it’s been one of the best things having a room of writers polish it up.
RIEGEL The animation team also has been really helpful and vocal about keeping diversity in the episodes as well. A lot of the board team and the animators are fans of the show and they want to see themselves in these characters and in the world. So there’s been a lot of great pitches that have come from the animation team like “Hey, could we have this be an LGBT couple, or could this character be representative of a minority community in some specific way?” that we hadn’t even thought of.
The kind of approach to inclusion and environment you cultivate to get it, as you’ve described, isn’t always the case on projects. So how much of that inclusion is just your team’s approach to storytelling and how much of that might be a byproduct of the nature of RPG?
WILLINGHAM It is the nature of DnD because it’s what your imagination can envision. For us, there are some things that are precious, but most of it is not. We’re fans of comic books, novels. We see multiple iterations of things over decades and you see how stories evolve and change, and that’s what makes them so beloved. So with us, we’re flexible. We want to see things be better and evolve and just represent something that’s going to be really impactful and meaningful to the community as well. It’s always best idea wins and our rooms and I think some people, it takes them just a minute to go like, “Oh, that’s cool to throw out here? It’s all cool in the game and everybody’s just throwing out stuff?” And we’re like, “Yeah, best idea wins.”
RIEGEL We’ve seen — and you’ve seen I’m sure, as a reporter in this space — big time projects that have come out where fan reactions have been like, “What! You changed that character from a white person to a Black person?!” It’s a testament to our fans, and the fans of RPG and fantasy in general, that we’ve done that on the show a bunch of times. We’ve changed genders, we’ve changed skin colors. We’ve changed races of characters to non-human type races. And we’ve never heard a peep about any of it other than cool, keep going. Because our fans love it and we love it, too.
AUMAN So inherent in RPGs is the idea that you can transform yourself. You can go into an RPG, you can become a different order of being. That’s what I think attracts so many people to RPGs. You can just be who you want to be and not be judged for it. And I hope that reflects in our series.
Titmouse is well-known and long-trusted in the animation community, but you’re also working with Amazon Studios, which isn’t necessarily known as an animation house. What’s it been like to have them as a partner in this?
WILLINGHAM We’ve seen the sort of shows that they’re putting their money behind, they’re interested in and it feels like they’re becoming a hub for nerd fandom. If you love something, if you’re a fan of a big time property, that’s what they’re really inspired by and interested in. It’s been amazing seeing what they pull in. Seeing Invincible, that is a great adaptation of that comic. We were inspired to try and push it even harder after seeing something like that. So I would be surprised in the next couple of years that people aren’t thinking about Amazon and that way around animation. Just for me, it’s been amazing to come in and be met with creative executives on their side that don’t come in and try and tell you what the show is or what they’re interested in filling in a certain slot. They’re like, “You guys know the show. You’ve got an amazing audience and a community. We just want to foster that and support it. How can we help?” They’re there to give feedback and especially as people that are coming to the property not having seen 400 hours of the campaign before. They’re just like, “We’ll give you notes,” and it’s this reciprocal process. So at least for me, it’s been an incredible process working with them in making the show. Very freeing, I’ll just say that.
RIEGEL Yeah, I would say to all nerds out there, don’t sleep on Prime Video. All the streamers have dabbled in fantasy and nerd stuff, for sure. But it kind of feels like Amazon is becoming the place that is just gonna be the nerd destination for stuff like this and they’re doing it the right way. They’re not getting in the way of creators. All the notes that they gave us on scripts, animatics and edits, they would always say, “Hey, here’s a suggestion, but if this bumps against your canon, ignore it.” That’s a great thing to hear from an executive. They respect the canon and the lore of what we created and they don’t want to mess it up.
AUMAN Yeah, they’ve been incredibly generous. They really represent our audience in a way, a general, larger audience. The questions they asked are legit. They’re really fantastic to work with and like the guys are saying, they really own the fantasy space — Wheels of Time, Rings of Power, Carnival Row. timer. This is really a one stop place for fantasy and I think it’s gonna continue. The fact that they literally rolled the dice with Critical Role, adapting it to an animated series, that’s incredible. Adopting a massive campaign into an animated series. It was a risk for them that’s paid off. We have a great relationship with them.
WILLINGHAM As fans looking at the new shows coming in, Peripheral, seeing the Fallout acquisition and Warhammer coming down the pipeline. This is a nerdy bastion. It’s paradise.
It seems like the streamer is making a positive and calculated investment in certain animation amid the happenings of last year, which felt a like a lot of divestment and cancellations.
AUMAN We feel safe here. We feel well taken care of at Amazon, whereas a lot of these streamers you wonder are we gonna get the axe. Are they going to pull the plug for whatever reason.
RIEGEL Not only given the axe. Nowadays they can erase your show from the internet.
WILLINGHAM Yeah, it just disappears.
AUMAN Erased out of time and space. So it’s great that we feel very safe at Amazon.
With season two, what is one thing you’re excited to do or have fans see?
WILLINGHAM At the end of those first three episodes, we try and keep that release in mind in the waves of three. It’s something that I don’t think we’ve ever done with this show before and I think it’ll help add to, not just the size of the world of Exandria, but also the limits of what these characters can make you feel.
RIEGEL I love the music of season two. In Season one, I was the only one who got to sing some songs. In season two, a lot more of the cast members get to sing.
AUMAN For me, it’s when the show gets totally psychedelic — when we go to other dimensions, other realities. We get to explore other realms of being. That’s just so exciting and so different. We get to push the envelope, even in terms of animation, of what we can do. We get to stretch the boundaries visually, not just in the storytelling and the emotion. Season two is so different from season one. I think the fans are gonna be really, really excited. What we’ve got, it feels bigger than ever. Season one largely takes place in one city, but season two we go all over the world.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
Source: Hollywood
