For some of us, Felicia Day will always be Penny from Dr. Horribles Sing-along-Blog, but that isnt because shes resting on her laurels. Shes an actor who starred in the recent Syfy channel movie Red, guest starred in the Epitaph One and Epitaph Two episodes of Dollhouse and will be appearing in the second half of the current season of Eureka on the Syfy channel in 2011. She also voiced a character in the recently released video game Fallout: New Vegas.
Felicia is also the writer and star of the webseries The Guild, which finished its fourth season earlier this year. The series centers around The Knights of Good, a guild of players obsessed with a World of Warcraft-like game who meet in real life for the first time in the initial season. Over the course of four seasons, the characters have grown deeper and the world has expanded. And the show has become funnier, managing to successfully straddle the line between character-based and situation-based humor so that even those who arent as obsessive about video games will be able to laugh at almost every joke.
This month the DVD collecting the fourth season goes on sale with a number of extras including the Bollywood-style music video Game On in addition to the trade paperback of the first run of comics and a new comic written by Felicia and her co-star Jeff Lewis, focusing on Lewis character Vork.
ALEX DUEBEN: I remember looking at extras on one of the DVDs and you mentioned that you have really bad writers block.
FELICIA DAY: I do. Unfortunately it still plagues me a lot. I have a little bit of a perfectionist syndrome going on. (laughs) The number one thing you have to know when youre writing is that youre not going to write perfect the first time, but you want it to be perfect, so sometimes that gets a little out of control.
AD: Do you spend a lot of time just thinking about it and not putting it on paper?
FD: Yeah. Or I just feel like I cant put it down unless thats the way it should be performed. (laughs) Its always challenging. You dont want to repeat yourself. You want to outdo yourself. Sometimes theres external pressures like thinking about how people are going to receive something, how its going to come out of somebodys mouth. All these things that have nothing to do with the writing can get in the way.
AD: Has it gotten easier over time?
FD: Not particularly. I mean, it has gotten easier in that you have deadlines and you have to meet them, but the longer you live with characters, the more you feel like you need to challenge yourself. You cant rehash what youve already done before. You always want to present something thats a little bit different than what anybody has seen. It almost gets harder to be reinventing the characters in a way and not be predictable.
AD: Thats a good lead in to talk about The Guild comics.
FD: I definitely take a different approach with the comics.
AD: Have you gotten used to writing for comics?
FD: The learning curve for that was pretty high. I mean Ive read comics, but writing it was a completely different challenge. Not only being the writer, but being the director and adding the visual elements, was definitely different from what Ive been used to in screenplays. You put down words for a screenplay and then the director is the one to bring it to life. I didnt even know this signing up. That it was the writers job to work with the artist, but really it comes to the writer to be as specific as possible as to what we visually want to see in the panels. That was the biggest challenge. Figuring out how to tell a story and let it flow and be able to surprise myself while Im writing.
I dont know how other people work. Writing it as a screenplay and then going back and figuring out what can fit in the panels turned out to be a much better process for me. Now Im doing five issues with Dark Horse that feature each of the other Guild characters and thats been a lot easier process. Im also co-writing several of them with other people, which has also been a learning curve, but fun. Im able to be a little bit more surprised about these characters that Ive lived with for over three years now.
AD: What is it like co-writing these issues? I know that youre writing the first one with Jeff Lewis.
FD: Yeah Im doing the first one with Jeff Lewis, who plays Vork, and Im doing the last one with Sandeep Parikh, who plays Zaboo. Thats fun because the origin of The Guild is them playing those characters. We were doing improv together and I wrote those characters specifically for them. I thought they were the funniest guys I ever knew so when I sat down to write The Guild[/I, I tried to feature those two parts so that they could play them. And theyre writers themselves. Jeff does a lot of writing. Hes actually more of a writer than an actor. Sandeep writes The Legend of Neil, which is his webseries.
Also the actors always come in with different ideas about the characters. It was a fun process with Jeff, doing the Vork character in a way that I hadnt thought about before. The same thing with Sandeep when we started working on that issue. I did Tink by myself when I was doing Eureka in Vancouver and the one Im working on now, Bladezz, Im co-writing with Sean Becker whos the director and editor of Seasons 2, 3, and 4 of The Guild. Thats really fun because hes a huge comic book fan and hes a director so he comes at it from a more visual standpoint.
AD: You make The Guild on essentially a barebones budget, so theres a certain practicality to your thinking when you write the episodes, but in comics none of that matters.
FD: The Guild is so dialogue based because, youre right, we can only shoot in our houses, basically. (laughs) We have to keep it to a bare minimum. We tend to keep our locations as small as we can and as few as we can each season, so its much more dialogue heavy and joke heavy. With the comics you can open up the whole world. You can go anywhere you want. You can have people do fantastic things and the production value, in a sense, is whatever your imagination is limited to. The real estate, as far as how much dialogue you can put in, is something Ive constantly been struggling with. Ill get notes back from the editor Scott Allie and hell be like, you have to cut three words from this bubble. (laughs) Im like, no! Its such a challenge. I can write dialogue all day, but being able to be precise and concise is a challenge. When I wrote season four after doing the comics, I found that it made me a lot more cogent of the fact that I needed to be a little more sparse with my dialogue. I think the jokes sometimes hit better if youre more concise.
AD: So are you in the midst of writing season five now?
FD: We havent gotten picked up for Season five. I have ideas floating around, so as soon as we get that pickup, Ill start writing. Im in the middle of writing the comics. Then I have two other webseries that Im working on thats still unannounced. Its been fun to design other characters, but its actually making me more excited to go back to season five of The Guild. At the end of season four, theyre all maybe going to a convention. Or theres a convention involved somehow. (laughs) Thatll be fun to delve into. And at the same time I just finished doing eight episodes of Eureka, so its been quite a juggle the last couple months to be doing so many awesome things. Im just thankful that Im doing what I really love every day and Im excited about all the things Im working on.
AD: Where do you see web content going? Theres more being done, but it really continues to feel hermetically sealed away from Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment field in many ways.
FD: Its totally different. Its almost like Sundance when independent films just came to the forefront. When they were smaller and it wasnt so cast-dependent and there wasnt big money involved. I think that trajectory can be pretty comparable but independent films even now are pretty separate from mainstream Hollywood films. Some of them have such big casts and become Oscar contenders, but if you look at ten years ago even, there was a huge separation between independent film and the mainstream. I think thats going to be a similar situation for web video. We dont have budgets to be able to make episodes every single week. That would require a huge crew and a writing staff and constant production facilities. Its a scale that you cant do, but at the same time, were moving to a world where people are unplugging their cable.
I think were becoming an on demand society and the place where people interact with their content is online. People arent just consuming, they want to consumer and share. Thats definitely a testament to where content is going. I love working in the venue that I do and I want to keep pushing web content to be more accepted. The viewers are there, its just that the money and the support and the production are not there yet. Theres some great really funny indie things, but people are doing them in their house or doing them on a very low budget scale, so you dont have the production value, you dont have the scale, you dont have the consistency in content that you do in the big Hollywood machine. But those are millions of dollars an episode. Its two different worlds.
Its not where anybody would want it to be. Were slowly but surely getting there. I am most gratified that Im part of that, rather than just jumping back into the machine even though I make a lot more money there. Im hopefully inspiring other people to do what Im doing.
AD: Many people have talked about you in terms of being a breakout star, but has The Guild and Dr. Horrible translated into producers, casting directors, other people who know you and want to work with you?
FD: To be honest with you, Ive been so out of the machine in a sense. I think all the roles that Ive gotten in the past two years have been [because] people who are writers, who know who I am, have written me parts. I dont know if casting directors would necessarily watch the web for talent. I think that producers and writers are looking to the web. Production is very precarious. Even in L.A., production is moving to Canada and out of state. There are some weaknesses in the armor of Hollywood and the smart people are looking to the web to see whats going on there. Thats what Im encountering. Writers and producers are familiar with my work and that seems to be the way Im going to work as an actor or collaborate with people in the future. Rather than going through a casting director and getting approved by the network.
Like you said, its two different parallel worlds, and until the money is there, until the power is there, its not going to get the mainstream attention. I dont care about that. Im just honored that on a show like Eureka, the show runner and the writers see what Im doing on the web, think its funny and wrote a part for me. Thats a much cooler way to get a part than just knocking on doors and trying to make my hair look pretty so I can be one of ten girls to pick from.
AD: Can you say anything about Eureka other than youre on eight episodes?
FD: I dont when its going to air, but I play a really quirky scientist named Holly Martin. She comes to Eureka on a secret project and immediately has a lot of clashing of wills with Fargo. Wil Wheaton is also part of that relationship triangle. It was such a fun time. I actually miss the time on set because we had such fun just hanging around. Its such a nice set and such a welcoming cast and crew. I cant wait for people to see the episodes. I think theyll be really, really funny.
AD: You made a comment in an interview that you always lived online. And that phrasing was interesting because I think for some people social media and lot of other recent innovations are strange and awkward but for other people, they feel very natural.
FD: I might be one of those first or second generation of people who have grown up more wired to people who I dont know than in real life. I think that kids nowadays I dont know if they will really understand how cable works (laughs) or just not knowing where everyone is at all times. My parents are very tech savvy and thats how I became tech savvy. My familys always been a little more tech savvy and on the cutting edge, but the scale and quickness with which peoples social interactions have changed is just is phenomenal. I hope I dont get left behind, but if youre raised with an ipad that you can touch and move things around with and you can press a button and watch whatever show you want, thats a different life perspective youve grown up with. Its going to change how they invent things for future generations and its happening very very quickly. Ive always been online. I was on dial-up before people were on the internet with prodigy and compuserve trying to get Kings Quest clues. (laughs) To me, that was always a cool way to connect with people. I might have been one of the first, but I think its definitely going to define all of our future generations.
AD: In Microsoft, you really seem to have found a perfect partner for The Guild, in that theyre not demanding any rights or changes to what or how you work.
FD: It was definitely a dream come true. All the people who offered to buy the show before that were traditional studios. Yeah, it would be awesome to work with you, youre really fancy, but how are you going to get me millions of people who havent already seen the show on youtube? They cant offer that. The fact that Microsoft was able to feature us on their portals and get millions of people watching the show, was really the deciding factor. The fact that I was able to retain the rights to the show is an absolute dream come true. Sprint has also been a partner. Its definitely rare. Thats my goal in the next year or so. To prove that you can do that again. Theres some really great shows out there like Riese, but there still hasnt been that one to have as many views as a cable show.
AD: With everything going on, do you have time to game much anymore?
FD: Oh yeah. I just finished Fallout: New Vegas last night. (laughs) I played with my own character, which was creepy, but whatever. I was a good character. And that was really fun. Im really excited about the new WoW changes. I havent been able to play in months, and to see theyre totally reinventing their game but being friendly to the people who know the game. I think theyve done it in a really smart way and I cant wait to play that. I dont watch enough TV and I really need to write more, but if I have three hours, I definitely want to be gaming.
Felicia is also the writer and star of the webseries The Guild, which finished its fourth season earlier this year. The series centers around The Knights of Good, a guild of players obsessed with a World of Warcraft-like game who meet in real life for the first time in the initial season. Over the course of four seasons, the characters have grown deeper and the world has expanded. And the show has become funnier, managing to successfully straddle the line between character-based and situation-based humor so that even those who arent as obsessive about video games will be able to laugh at almost every joke.
This month the DVD collecting the fourth season goes on sale with a number of extras including the Bollywood-style music video Game On in addition to the trade paperback of the first run of comics and a new comic written by Felicia and her co-star Jeff Lewis, focusing on Lewis character Vork.
ALEX DUEBEN: I remember looking at extras on one of the DVDs and you mentioned that you have really bad writers block.
FELICIA DAY: I do. Unfortunately it still plagues me a lot. I have a little bit of a perfectionist syndrome going on. (laughs) The number one thing you have to know when youre writing is that youre not going to write perfect the first time, but you want it to be perfect, so sometimes that gets a little out of control.
AD: Do you spend a lot of time just thinking about it and not putting it on paper?
FD: Yeah. Or I just feel like I cant put it down unless thats the way it should be performed. (laughs) Its always challenging. You dont want to repeat yourself. You want to outdo yourself. Sometimes theres external pressures like thinking about how people are going to receive something, how its going to come out of somebodys mouth. All these things that have nothing to do with the writing can get in the way.
AD: Has it gotten easier over time?
FD: Not particularly. I mean, it has gotten easier in that you have deadlines and you have to meet them, but the longer you live with characters, the more you feel like you need to challenge yourself. You cant rehash what youve already done before. You always want to present something thats a little bit different than what anybody has seen. It almost gets harder to be reinventing the characters in a way and not be predictable.
AD: Thats a good lead in to talk about The Guild comics.
FD: I definitely take a different approach with the comics.
AD: Have you gotten used to writing for comics?
FD: The learning curve for that was pretty high. I mean Ive read comics, but writing it was a completely different challenge. Not only being the writer, but being the director and adding the visual elements, was definitely different from what Ive been used to in screenplays. You put down words for a screenplay and then the director is the one to bring it to life. I didnt even know this signing up. That it was the writers job to work with the artist, but really it comes to the writer to be as specific as possible as to what we visually want to see in the panels. That was the biggest challenge. Figuring out how to tell a story and let it flow and be able to surprise myself while Im writing.
I dont know how other people work. Writing it as a screenplay and then going back and figuring out what can fit in the panels turned out to be a much better process for me. Now Im doing five issues with Dark Horse that feature each of the other Guild characters and thats been a lot easier process. Im also co-writing several of them with other people, which has also been a learning curve, but fun. Im able to be a little bit more surprised about these characters that Ive lived with for over three years now.
AD: What is it like co-writing these issues? I know that youre writing the first one with Jeff Lewis.
FD: Yeah Im doing the first one with Jeff Lewis, who plays Vork, and Im doing the last one with Sandeep Parikh, who plays Zaboo. Thats fun because the origin of The Guild is them playing those characters. We were doing improv together and I wrote those characters specifically for them. I thought they were the funniest guys I ever knew so when I sat down to write The Guild[/I, I tried to feature those two parts so that they could play them. And theyre writers themselves. Jeff does a lot of writing. Hes actually more of a writer than an actor. Sandeep writes The Legend of Neil, which is his webseries.
Also the actors always come in with different ideas about the characters. It was a fun process with Jeff, doing the Vork character in a way that I hadnt thought about before. The same thing with Sandeep when we started working on that issue. I did Tink by myself when I was doing Eureka in Vancouver and the one Im working on now, Bladezz, Im co-writing with Sean Becker whos the director and editor of Seasons 2, 3, and 4 of The Guild. Thats really fun because hes a huge comic book fan and hes a director so he comes at it from a more visual standpoint.
AD: You make The Guild on essentially a barebones budget, so theres a certain practicality to your thinking when you write the episodes, but in comics none of that matters.
FD: The Guild is so dialogue based because, youre right, we can only shoot in our houses, basically. (laughs) We have to keep it to a bare minimum. We tend to keep our locations as small as we can and as few as we can each season, so its much more dialogue heavy and joke heavy. With the comics you can open up the whole world. You can go anywhere you want. You can have people do fantastic things and the production value, in a sense, is whatever your imagination is limited to. The real estate, as far as how much dialogue you can put in, is something Ive constantly been struggling with. Ill get notes back from the editor Scott Allie and hell be like, you have to cut three words from this bubble. (laughs) Im like, no! Its such a challenge. I can write dialogue all day, but being able to be precise and concise is a challenge. When I wrote season four after doing the comics, I found that it made me a lot more cogent of the fact that I needed to be a little more sparse with my dialogue. I think the jokes sometimes hit better if youre more concise.
AD: So are you in the midst of writing season five now?
FD: We havent gotten picked up for Season five. I have ideas floating around, so as soon as we get that pickup, Ill start writing. Im in the middle of writing the comics. Then I have two other webseries that Im working on thats still unannounced. Its been fun to design other characters, but its actually making me more excited to go back to season five of The Guild. At the end of season four, theyre all maybe going to a convention. Or theres a convention involved somehow. (laughs) Thatll be fun to delve into. And at the same time I just finished doing eight episodes of Eureka, so its been quite a juggle the last couple months to be doing so many awesome things. Im just thankful that Im doing what I really love every day and Im excited about all the things Im working on.
AD: Where do you see web content going? Theres more being done, but it really continues to feel hermetically sealed away from Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment field in many ways.
FD: Its totally different. Its almost like Sundance when independent films just came to the forefront. When they were smaller and it wasnt so cast-dependent and there wasnt big money involved. I think that trajectory can be pretty comparable but independent films even now are pretty separate from mainstream Hollywood films. Some of them have such big casts and become Oscar contenders, but if you look at ten years ago even, there was a huge separation between independent film and the mainstream. I think thats going to be a similar situation for web video. We dont have budgets to be able to make episodes every single week. That would require a huge crew and a writing staff and constant production facilities. Its a scale that you cant do, but at the same time, were moving to a world where people are unplugging their cable.
I think were becoming an on demand society and the place where people interact with their content is online. People arent just consuming, they want to consumer and share. Thats definitely a testament to where content is going. I love working in the venue that I do and I want to keep pushing web content to be more accepted. The viewers are there, its just that the money and the support and the production are not there yet. Theres some great really funny indie things, but people are doing them in their house or doing them on a very low budget scale, so you dont have the production value, you dont have the scale, you dont have the consistency in content that you do in the big Hollywood machine. But those are millions of dollars an episode. Its two different worlds.
Its not where anybody would want it to be. Were slowly but surely getting there. I am most gratified that Im part of that, rather than just jumping back into the machine even though I make a lot more money there. Im hopefully inspiring other people to do what Im doing.
AD: Many people have talked about you in terms of being a breakout star, but has The Guild and Dr. Horrible translated into producers, casting directors, other people who know you and want to work with you?
FD: To be honest with you, Ive been so out of the machine in a sense. I think all the roles that Ive gotten in the past two years have been [because] people who are writers, who know who I am, have written me parts. I dont know if casting directors would necessarily watch the web for talent. I think that producers and writers are looking to the web. Production is very precarious. Even in L.A., production is moving to Canada and out of state. There are some weaknesses in the armor of Hollywood and the smart people are looking to the web to see whats going on there. Thats what Im encountering. Writers and producers are familiar with my work and that seems to be the way Im going to work as an actor or collaborate with people in the future. Rather than going through a casting director and getting approved by the network.
Like you said, its two different parallel worlds, and until the money is there, until the power is there, its not going to get the mainstream attention. I dont care about that. Im just honored that on a show like Eureka, the show runner and the writers see what Im doing on the web, think its funny and wrote a part for me. Thats a much cooler way to get a part than just knocking on doors and trying to make my hair look pretty so I can be one of ten girls to pick from.
AD: Can you say anything about Eureka other than youre on eight episodes?
FD: I dont when its going to air, but I play a really quirky scientist named Holly Martin. She comes to Eureka on a secret project and immediately has a lot of clashing of wills with Fargo. Wil Wheaton is also part of that relationship triangle. It was such a fun time. I actually miss the time on set because we had such fun just hanging around. Its such a nice set and such a welcoming cast and crew. I cant wait for people to see the episodes. I think theyll be really, really funny.
AD: You made a comment in an interview that you always lived online. And that phrasing was interesting because I think for some people social media and lot of other recent innovations are strange and awkward but for other people, they feel very natural.
FD: I might be one of those first or second generation of people who have grown up more wired to people who I dont know than in real life. I think that kids nowadays I dont know if they will really understand how cable works (laughs) or just not knowing where everyone is at all times. My parents are very tech savvy and thats how I became tech savvy. My familys always been a little more tech savvy and on the cutting edge, but the scale and quickness with which peoples social interactions have changed is just is phenomenal. I hope I dont get left behind, but if youre raised with an ipad that you can touch and move things around with and you can press a button and watch whatever show you want, thats a different life perspective youve grown up with. Its going to change how they invent things for future generations and its happening very very quickly. Ive always been online. I was on dial-up before people were on the internet with prodigy and compuserve trying to get Kings Quest clues. (laughs) To me, that was always a cool way to connect with people. I might have been one of the first, but I think its definitely going to define all of our future generations.
AD: In Microsoft, you really seem to have found a perfect partner for The Guild, in that theyre not demanding any rights or changes to what or how you work.
FD: It was definitely a dream come true. All the people who offered to buy the show before that were traditional studios. Yeah, it would be awesome to work with you, youre really fancy, but how are you going to get me millions of people who havent already seen the show on youtube? They cant offer that. The fact that Microsoft was able to feature us on their portals and get millions of people watching the show, was really the deciding factor. The fact that I was able to retain the rights to the show is an absolute dream come true. Sprint has also been a partner. Its definitely rare. Thats my goal in the next year or so. To prove that you can do that again. Theres some really great shows out there like Riese, but there still hasnt been that one to have as many views as a cable show.
AD: With everything going on, do you have time to game much anymore?
FD: Oh yeah. I just finished Fallout: New Vegas last night. (laughs) I played with my own character, which was creepy, but whatever. I was a good character. And that was really fun. Im really excited about the new WoW changes. I havent been able to play in months, and to see theyre totally reinventing their game but being friendly to the people who know the game. I think theyve done it in a really smart way and I cant wait to play that. I dont watch enough TV and I really need to write more, but if I have three hours, I definitely want to be gaming.