EllyRox

While attending MAGFest 13, I got the chance to catch up with the voice acting bad ass Matthew Mercer.  I’m not going to lie, I babbled at him a bit, and I’m still transcribing the rest of the audio, there’s a ton of crowd noise as we did our interview in the lobby of the Gaylord. He was very accommodating and excited to talk, I have yet to be burned by the old adage ‘never meet your idols’ as thus far every one of them has been nothing short of wonderful, and Matthew is no exception, he took time out of his busy fest schedule to sit and talk with me.

Matthew Mercer is currently best known for Levi from Attack on Titan, and Tygra in the new Thundercats cartoon. He voices Tony Stark and Hawkeye in the newer Avengers cartoons, as well as Z.W.E.I. in Soul Calibur V. He’s also voiced Kilrogg Deadeye, Rexxar, Thoktar Ironskull, Hatock from World of Warcraft and in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Solid Snake in Dr. 1UP, Keyes in Aliens: Colonial Marines, and rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy in Resident Evil 6. The list goes on and on.

PGG: Well, First of all thank you!

Matthew Mercer: It’s my pleasure!

PGG: So you’re a big fan of MAGFest? How many times have you been here?

Matt: This is my 4th time, first time was 2009 I actually missed a couple. One year Nobuo Uematsu, or Uematsu San, who was the composer for the early final fantasy games, was a guest and was here with his band The Black Mages which do insane final fantasy rock covers and, I missed it and I was so sad. I’m a huge game enthusiast, huge game music enthusiast. So when I first head about this event and they invited to be a guest my first year I was blown away by how much fun I had and how it felt like no other convention, so it’s hard pressed for me to find a reason not to come.

PGG: You commented earlier how this convention is different from other conventions? Say something like comic con that’s just on such a huge scale that feels like everyone is in their own sort of cluster, this is more of a community?

Matt: Yeah, I think is a lot of other conventions, and events its, a lot of the primary focus is for companies to invest and have essentially a hall of promotion for their properties. There is a sense of community, and I love a lot of other events but this place, MAGFest, more than any other feels the purest. The least surrounded by sales pitches and promotional things from companies that are trying to sell you something, just come here, game, meet people, have fun.

The fact that they have the arcade open 24 hours, all these great collectors that bring their personal cabinets, to just create these fantastic game rooms, then you have the console room you can play at 3am with a drink in your hand, you can play Oregon Trail or pop in Super Mario 2 like I did last night at 3:30 am, there’s just something very special about being able to do that. You can’t do that at other events, there’s just something so special about how they’ve managed to maintain that feeling with as much as it’s grown over the last few years, so this event is like no other in my opinion.

PGG: Were there a lot of other people around in the gaming area at 3am?

Matt: Yeah, it’s a busy place! I had to wait a while to find an old NES console to be open so I could pop in my game that I checked out!. They have library check out, you can walk up and ask if they have a game if they don’t have it, which they most likely will, or it’s in use, you can just take it, pop it in and play it for as long as you want at a station, and that is amazing!

PGG: Yes that is! My sister and I did that in the board game area, we checked out Pixel Lincoln, just the fact that it’s a game library and there’s so much, they have anything you could want, every kind of game, and we were doing this at midnight, it’s just great. Everyone is very friendly, very inclusive, the hotel staff has really been great.

Matt: I think for all the negative stigma the gaming community seems to have acquired over the past few years, the way that girls in the community have been treated, and just in general a rage that online gamers have kind of promoted themselves, unintentionally as it may be, this event to me reaffirms that it’s NOT the base, that is not the norm. It’s a very small percentage and once gamers are face to face even the ones who may be that way online, realize that we’re all just human beings, wanting to have a good time and sometimes that smile, that handshake, and that little experience of playing a fighting game together at 2am is so much more important that tearing down someone’s post on face book or any sort of strange internet movements. This event really affirms my belief that the gamer community is a wonderful community, it’s a very positive community, very supportive community and one that I’m very proud to be a member of and will continue to do so.

PGG: I know you’re working on the Muzzled musical, how is that going? Can you tell me a little about it?

Matt: It’s a musical, it’s been a four year endeavor trying to get it going. Me and Zach Grafton, it’s largely Zach Grafton’s baby. We co created it, and wrote early drafts, we’d been trying to pitch it, we had a year where we were in the middle of sales meetings with big companies, and nothing really panned out. We were still in this weird amorphous place and a musical wasn’t a proven avenue, so we eventually went to Kickstarter, me and Zach worked together on this web series There will be brawl , and he’s a brilliant writer and a good friend of mine, so when we created this property we knew it had legs. We just wanted to find the right way to do it. The Kickstarter was thankfully successful. We have some great talent involved, Ashly Burch from ‘Hey Ash, Whatcha playin?‘ another great voice actress friend of mine, a lot of the cast from The Lizzie Bennet Diaries which is a very popular YouTube series. We have Ashley Clements, Mary Kate Wiles, Maxwell Glick. (Check out the kickstarter for the full cast list.)

It’s essentially, the best I can put it in a nut shell, it’s a modern day kind of fantasy world where the ability to sing is how you get your power, the stronger a singer you are, the more you can bend the elements to your will and become a powerful force of magic. So a big war that occurred 20 years earlier ended up putting the the black hearts, which are the misunderstood misfits of society, who lost the war, put them in the gutter, giving them these muzzles, these kind of runes on their neck, preventing them from singing thus making them easier to control. Putting them in the age of the royals the crème de la crème, the ones who really were the top of society.

The show revolves around Malfalia who is the daughter of the lead Blackheart sorceress, played by Juliet Landau, Drucilla for all you Buffy fans out there. It’s her (Malfalia) realizing that she wants to be a princess, and try out the royal life, but she gets knocked off that mindset in mean girl fashion when she finally meets the princesses. She decides instead to masquerade as a princes, infiltrate royal society and destroy it from the inside. So that’s kind of the essence of the show, it’s a fun musical, very much in the vein of Dr. Horrible, more of using parody of musical element.

We finished shooting, we just wrapped shooting last week. We had a lot of delays getting into production. We had to get casting locked down, locations locked down, a lot of costumes, a lot of pre-production to write all the songs. Jason Charles Miller one of our producers is an incredible songwriter, he’s the lead singer of the band godhead he did a lot of great music for Disney, for HBO. He wrote so many amazing tracks for the show, that I’m really excited about, music really is the star of the show.

It’s right now going to editing this week the director, Sean Becker, he did The Guild, The Flog, is right now digging into it probably as we speak. So we’re hoping have something out by the summer.

PGG: When we looked at the kickstarter, I was like, OH! I know everybody here! I’d heard your name, but I didn’t have a face to put with it before I started reading up on Muzzled, and then your other projects.

Matt: Bonus of voice over!

PGG: That’s the thing, do you have people who recognize you and want you to do specific voices, or do you have a favorite voice?

Matt: A favorite voice is hard to pick, I’m one of those crazy kids who runs Dungeons and Dragons games and has voices in his head for each character. I’m quite partial to the Scottish dialect, (Matt slips into a perfect Scottish accent) “there’s something about the scott’s brouge that just rolls off the tounge. It feels nice, it sounds nice, it’s warm, it’s nice it has a nice roll to the ‘r’s. I love doing it, I love saying it. Any chance I have to do it I’ll take.”

The strange voices are fun too (slips into crazy old man voice) like the shop keeper “Heh heh heh, enter my shop, what are you lookin’ for?” those are fun, it’s hard to say I have a favorite, it’s like picking between children.

On the recognition thing, it’s becoming more and more that way, what’s really cool, while I enjoy the anonymity of voice over, and being able to walk into a grocery store and, yanno be a person, the fan base has become more and more prominent and people are more interested in finding out who it is that does the voices behind their favorite cartoons. I really like that, because then I’m able to meet the fans, reach out talk to them online, have this one on one connection. Which I love, it’s cool to feel appreciated as a performer, actors thrive on validation, so it’s good that people actually care what you do.