Welcome to ‘The Mighty Nein’

It’s the day before New York Comic Con 2025, and Sam Riegel has just dropped a huge spoiler about who auditioned to play a fan-favorite role in The Mighty Nein, their newest animated series: Christian Bale.

In true Riegel fashion, it’s only a joke. But it’s one that’s quickly taking on a life of its own in the TV Insider studios, an apt parallel to how things have unfolded over the past 10 years for the group of voice actors known as Critical Role.

Since first streaming their living room Dungeons & Dragons game in 2015, Riegel and his friends Laura Bailey, Travis Willingham, Matthew Mercer, Liam O’Brien, Ashley Johnson, Marisha Ray and Taliesin Jaffe have created their own company and brand that includes everything from merchandise to their own non-profit to their own gaming system—and have carved out a distinctive status as one of pop culture’s most popular actual-play groups. The night before our interview, thousands of fans packed into a sold-out Radio City Music Hall to watch them play D&D on stage for five hours.

When actress Felicia Day (Supernatural) first asked Mercer, who serves as the group’s de facto Dungeon Master, if he would consider broadcasting his home game to viewers via a web series on her entertainment website Geek & Sundry, everyone wondered the same thing: would people really want to watch a group of friends sit around and play D&D for 4 or 5 hours?

Given their surge in popularity, it’s safe to say that the answer was yes. Since Critical Role’s creation, devotees known as “Critters” have followed the group, supporting them through cosplay, fan art, and traveling around the world to one of their many live shows. In 2019, that support shattered records when the group launched a Kickstarter to fund a 22-minute animated short based on their first tabletop campaign, Vox Machina, which ran from 2015—2017. It’s a ride that took them from the dream of a single episode to three seasons (a fourth is on the way) of a series called The Legend of Vox Machina on Prime Video. Making their story accessible to people outside of the Dungeons & Dragons world helped grow an even larger fan base.

With so much change over the years, it’s only natural to shake things up. And so, for their second animated series, The Mighty Nein, which premieres November 19, the group — who also serve as the show’s executive producers — once again had to ask themselves a question: how will their audience receive something that’s mostly the same but also a little different?

Adapted from Critical Role’s second campaign, which ran from 2018 to 2021, The Mighty Nein represents a distinct departure from The Legend of Vox Machina. That doesn’t mean that the signature things that make up a Critical Role story—witty banter, relatable characters, found family friendships—won’t be present. But the story, which follows a group of chaotic antiheroes each dealing with their own troubled pasts as they try to save the world from a magical arcane relic called “The Beacon,” is darker. The characters are more mature. The world is more complex. And the themes are more adult.

“I think we’ve done a fair job of teasing the characters’ various backstories,” says Willingham, who plays orphaned sailor Fjord Stone. “The Mighty Nein are not necessarily heroes. They have their individual motivations, and they are going to frequently be at odds with the other. So I think we’ll be interested to see how people react to these characters when they’re starting out.”

“I really feel like in Mighty Nein, the world and the governments and the sort of global struggles that are happening are just as important as the characters,” says O’Brien, who voices Caleb Widogast, a wizard who wields fire magic. “So a lot of time and thought and care was put into bringing the world to life and how best to fit the characters into that.”

“Session Zero Trope”

The process to bring The Mighty Nein to life was, according to Willingham, “a well-oiled machine by the time we finished the first couple of seasons of The Legend of Vox Machina” after debuting in 2021.

“I think it allowed a little more flexibility to figure out how we could kind of tweak the process, like longer episodes kind of leaning into a little bit of a shift to format because we had the comfort of knowing we didn’t have to do everything from the ground up ourselves,” adds Mercer.

In other words: “We didn’t have to worry about how we were going to make it,” explains Riegel, who plays Nott The Brave, a green-skinned goblin girl harboring a hidden past and a close relationship with her flask. “We could just worry about making it.”

That didn’t mean the blueprint was the same. Ray, who plays Cobalt Soul monk Beauregard Lionett, acknowledges that while The Legend of Vox Machina leaned heavily into the D&D trope of having everyone meet in a tavern, “you can’t do the same thing twice.” Enter: Session Zero, a.k.a. a meeting that Dungeon Masters usually hold with their players before the game begins, where character options and intentions are laid out. Since The Mighty Nein has longer episodes (each of the eight installments runs roughly 45 minutes), storytelling could be parceled out, which means viewers get to meet these characters at the beginning of their journeys.

“I think getting to see Session Zero is going to be really exciting for fans,” teases showrunner Tasha Huo (Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft), who, in addition to being an avid D&D player, is a proud Critter herself. “It’s all stuff that I was always so curious about.”

Of course, given that each of the weekly games Critical Role plays at the table lasts about 4 to 5 hours, that’s still a lot of narrative to whittle down for an adaptation.

“You never have enough time,” she admits. “When we first started to think about what Season 1 would be, we didn’t really know it was going to be what it ended up being because there are so many storylines to choose from, and it all ends up at the same endgame. And it wasn’t until talking it through about who was the main villain in those early days, what were the storylines from our heroes from the cast that we really invested in the most, and then, how do we make Season 1 about those things?”

“It felt like, despite the fact that we have twice as much time now, we still could use four times the amount of time that we had to get through everything,” says Taliesin Jaffe, who voices Mollymauk Tealeaf, a flamboyant, purple-skinned tarot card reader for a traveling carnival. “And then also just checking in on what everybody else in the story was doing—the villains and the non-player characters, all the things that were happening behind the scenes since this wasn’t like Vox Machina where we were in the middle of everything.”

New Faces, New Places

The Mighty Nein comes at a serendipitous time in Critical Role’s existence. It’s their tenth year of playing D&D for audiences, and last month, they launched their much-anticipated fourth tabletop campaign that includes 13 players and a new Dungeon Master, Dimension 20‘s Brennan Lee Mulligan. The change allows Mercer to, for the first time in three main campaigns, become a fully-fledged player—much in the same way that The Mighty Nein finally allows him to be more than just the voice of side characters who show up every few episodes.

In The Mighty Nein, Mercer lends his voice to the character of Essek, a Kryn elf and spy for the Dynasty, who becomes a significantly important part of the narrative. In the Critical Role fandom, he’s better known as “Hot Boi.” (And in this piece, he’s the source of Riegel’s earlier joking about casting Christian Bale).

“I get to be more meaningfully in the story with my friends,” says Mercer of the experience. “Recording The Legend of Vox Machina has been so much fun. I get to watch all of them perform, and occasionally I go, ‘Hey, look out! I’m a dragon, bye!’ So it’s fun to meaningfully have some longer emotional arcs and explore a character that is very deeply complicated and someone that I really appreciate as a character in the world of Exandria.”

Speaking of Exandria: as Critical Role itself expands, so do the worlds it visits. Be prepared to learn and be astounded by new locales: The Mighty Nein‘s adventures take place in the continent of Wildemount, from places like the Menagerie Coast to the Dwendalian Empire to the aforementioned Kryn Dynasty of Xhorhas.

“Seeing Rosohna [the capital city of the Kryn Dynasty] realized visually, even just going through the process of collaborating with the art team to give them the descriptors and the ideas in our various imaginations…and then to see the art come back and going, that is so much cooler!” gushes Mercer.

“There’s a moment in the first episode where it kind of gets revealed and my mind was blown,” teases Bailey, who voices mischievous, blue-skinned cleric Jester Lavorre. “It was so cool to see it. I audibly gasped.”

And then there are the guest voices that will lend their talents to the series that stretch from Disney Princesses to pop culture royalty. Auli’i Cravalho, Anika Noni Rose, Lucy Liu, Alan Cumming, Mark Strong, Anjelica Huston, Nathan Fillion, T’Nia Miller, Graham McTavish, and Ivanna Sakhno are just some of the big names that fans can listen for.

“I feel like everything starts with the text thread and us being like, wouldn’t it be so cool? And then it kind of goes from there,” says Ray about their casting wish list.

“For the most part, we got the people that we really wanted, which was shocking,” says Huo. “I think as soon as we started to get some of these bigger names, we realized, people are really responding to this show, whether or not they’re D&D fans. And I think that’s a credit to what we’ve done, which is really make it an elevated drama in the form of animation.”

It wasn’t just famous voices that got added to the mix. Because Caleb’s main language is Zemnian (aka German), The Mighty Nein also presented an opportunity to incorporate voices who could bring that to the show, both new and familiar.

“Mark Strong does such an amazing job,” says Huo. (Strong plays Trent Ikithon, Caleb’s former mento,r who is responsible for much of the character’s resulting trauma). “And he got to stretch his German chops, which he never gets to do.”

The Nein’s Best Kept Secret

During Critical Role’s tabletop game, Ashley Johnson, who plays a barbarian and mercenary Yasha Nydoorin, divided her time between Los Angeles and New York, where she was filming the TV series Blindspot. Able to only pop into the story when time permitted meant that Yasha’s character development wasn’t shown as much it could have been.

Fans, fear not: The Mighty Nein makes sure Yasha gets the screen time and character development she deserves—even if everyone, including Johnson herself, is wary about sharing details.

“I think when we were in the writer’s room though, we realized that a lot of Yasha’s early, most dynamic character moments happened off screen,” Riegel hints. “And we were like, I wish we could show some of that stuff. And then we were like, oh, wait! We can! So adjustments were made.”

To Wildemount…and Beyond

Critical Role was two years into their Mighty Nein campaign when COVID shut down the world—and the ability for the group to play together at a table. When everyone sought out distractions and ways to connect when they couldn’t be physically social, many discovered Critical Role. When the group was finally able to figure out a way to safely return to the game, their growing fanbase came with them. Now, those fans are about to watch characters who came to mean a lot to them come to life.

“They finally get to share it with their friends who just do not have the time or energy to wherewithal to get through a campaign. And they just finally are like, these are the characters I will not shut up about for the last eight years,” says Jaffe. Huo is just as pumped for fans to see this part of Exandria.

As for what the rest of the cast is looking forward to? Mercer is excited for everyone to see how the collaboration between the storyboard artists, art teams, and animators comes together to create literal magic. Bailey can’t wait to see fans experience something new together.

“Since we are starting from this origin place, it’s a brand-new thing for our audience, and they don’t know what they’re getting,” she hints.

The Mighty Nein may have played their last session at the table in 2021, and the cast, as well as Critters, know where their characters ended up. But that didn’t make returning to the story any less special.

“It’s very much like a stage show in which you try not to play the ending too much and go back to that spot where they started,” says Willingham. “But I remember we would write scenes and just be in the writer’s room saying, ‘Oh man, I want to record this. That’s going to be a day.’ And then you show up for the recording and you get to lock eyes with all of your friends, and you’re so excited to do it all. But then some of these scenes hit so hard and you take a big breath and dive back into that trauma that these characters had. And it’s so impactful and it’s so meaningful.

“The Mighty Nein and Caleb are very important to me,” shares O’Brien. “He’s made up of all these little hidden pieces of my own life and my friendship with Sam. I still can’t believe that we got to tell this story with the depth and the love and the attention that we had. It’s still totally overwhelming. But the days in the booth where we hit these deep, deep emotional core moments were intense and gratifying and creatively rewarding and unforgettable.”

Ten years in, Critical Role shows no signs of slowing down—there’s a video game on the way, more in-universe novels and comics, and no shortage of stories brewing in the minds of everyone involved. Next year, they’ll travel overseas to play sold-out live shows in places like Scotland and Germany. But no matter how big they get, there’s one thing that won’t change: they’re still eight friends who enjoy the simple magic that comes with rolling a dice.

“I still love meeting people who love the animated series, love The Legend of Vox Machina, and I hope those who will love The Mighty Nein,” says Riegel. “And they say something like, ‘Are these characters based on something?’ And we say, ‘yes, there’s actually a D&D campaign.’ And they’re like, wait, what?! That’s the best.”

The Mighty Nein, Series Premiere, Wednesday, November 19, Prime Video (first three episodes)