How ‘Critical Role’ and ‘Legend of Vox Machina’ Changed Nerd Culture Forever
For starring in a web series so huge that it’s now got its own animated series on Prime Video, the stars of Critical Role are surprisingly humble.
“When people ask us, ‘What's the secret [behind our success]?’ [The answer is,] we really are just trying to do it for ourselves and make it full of the things that we love,” co-star and voice acting veteran Travis Willingham told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “We've been very lucky, in that our audience loves a lot of those same things.”
Thanks to that audience, Critical Role, which started as a Dungeons & Dragons game among friends, has now grown into an empire. There is, of course, the group’s extremely popular weekly live-stream show on Twitch, which has been running on a regular basis since 2015. But the series has also spun off comics, novels, an upcoming cookbook, a nonprofit foundation, and that animated series, The Legend of Vox Machina, now in its second season.