- Matthew Lillard had his biggest payday ever for “Scooby-Doo 2,” but the movie flopped.
- The movie’s reception altered the trajectory of his career and prompted him to do a total reset.
- Lillard is still acting but is now also an entrepreneur with his own spirits company.
In the mid-2000s, Matthew Lillard’s career had reached new heights.
He was starring in a Warner Bros. franchise based on beloved IP —Scooby-Doo — and had just wrapped the sequel, netting him his biggest payday yet. He and his family lived in a big house and drove expensive cars. He’d finally made it.
“I thought I’d be No. 1 on the call sheet for the next 10 years of movies,” Lillard told Business Insider. “And the reality was the exact opposite happened.”
The movie that gave him the big payday, “Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed,” ended up being a critical flop that underperformed at the box office, prompting Warner Bros. to cancel its plans for a third film. Suddenly, Lillard’s plans for his future were canceled, too.
Instead of his career and his paychecks growing exponentially, a yearslong pause and some downsizing ensued. It took that reckoning and many years of reflection for Lillard to rethink how he views happiness and success.
Fast forward two decades, and Lillard is happier than ever. He’s still acting, and is returning for the sequel to the box-office smash “Five Nights At Freddy’s.” He’s also branched out into business, filling his cup by running his own spirits company, Find Familiar Spirits.
“One of the great moments in my life is understanding that I have power outside of just being an actor,” Lillard said. “That, to me, has been way more satisfying than getting a part in a movie.”
Lillard recalibrated his career when job offers dried up after ‘Scooby-Doo 2’
Before “Scooby-Doo,” Lillard’s career had been a mixed bag.
After his breakthrough in John Waters’ 1994 black comedy “Serial Mom,” about a housewife who’s secretly a serial killer, he gained indie credibility with leading roles in movies like 1998’s “SLC Punk!” and rose to prominence in bigger studio films like the first “Scream” movie and “She’s All That.”
Back then, he was still sensitive to the public’s feedback: He was reading all the (often not great) reviews, and even stopping by movie theaters to see if anyone would recognize him.
“I was caught up in the success of what I was doing, I was caught up in the parts I was getting, I was caught up in this drive to be quote-unquote famous,” Lillard recalled.
But his early career disappointments didn’t upend him in the way the response to “Scooby-Doo 2” did. As an actor then in his mid-30s, it was time to find his niche as a character actor or become a leading man. The movie’s failure underscored that he had done neither.
While Lillard continued to work, voicing Shaggy in new “Scooby-Doo” animated projects and even making his own directorial debut with the 2012 coming-of-age drama “Fat Kid Rules the World,” it wasn’t the career he expected or one that was giving him joy.
That feeling crystallized when his team brought him an offer to appear on a popular reality competition series where acting careers go to die.
“I was going to do ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ And I was like, if I do ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ I’ll never win an Academy Award,” Lillard recalled. “If I do ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ I’ll be famous and not a great actor, and I really just wanted to be a great actor.”
So he decided to get rid of his whole team and went back to his first agent: “I said, ‘I just want to be an actor. I just want to be in movies. I want to reset my expectations.'”
The reset was wholesale. In addition to Lillard getting rid of his family’s fancy cars and downsizing to a smaller home, Lillard’s wife went back to work, and Lillard went back to teaching acting.
“I went back to looking for other things in my life other than just acting,” Lillard said. That in turn led him to his latest venture.
Lillard’s liquor company Find Familiar Spirits is geared toward his favorite fandoms
Lillard’s pivot into the spirits industry started about two years ago, when he cofounded his liquor company Find Familiar Spirits, which uses some of his favorite fandoms as inspiration for high-end liquor products.
An avid tabletop gamer, Lillard made his first launch, Quest’s End, a line of whiskeys inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. The company’s second brand, Macabre Spirits, launched this month with a tequila reposado geared toward another community near and dear to Lillard’s heart: horror fans. He even teamed with “The Haunting of Hill House” and “Midnight Mass” creator Mike Flanagan for the launch; each bottle of Macabre comes with a horror novella written by Flanagan.
“It’s an homage and a love letter to sort of a gothic sense of storytelling,” Lillard said.
Lillard’s collaboration with Flanagan has been fruitful on multiple levels. Just as Flanagan popped up in Lillard’s liquor project, Lillard will soon play a small but significant role in one of Flanagan’s movies, “The Life of Chuck.” The movie, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, won the festival’s People’s Choice Award and will be released in spring 2025.
Lillard has several big movie projects lined up — and he’s not ruling out a ‘Scream’ return
After finding a niche in horror movies, Lillard is now in something of a renaissance era.
He’s back to filming the sequel to the wildly successful 2023 horror movie “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” which banked $297.1 million on a $20 million budget. Based on the video game franchise of the same name, Lillard plays William Afton, the villain at the center of the story.
The first movie’s success catapulted him back into the spotlight, though ironically, Lillard had no idea how big the movie would end up being and described taking the role as a leap of faith.
“In the original script I think I had two lines,” recalled Lillard, who was courted by director Emma Tammi for the part. He wasn’t even initially sure why she wanted him in it, until Tammi explained that the story was conceived as a trilogy of movies, and his character would become increasingly important as the series went on. The sequel is due out next year.
Lillard also hasn’t closed the door on a return to another iconic horror franchise — “Scream.”
Though his character Stu Macher died at the end of the first film, which was released in 1996, fans have been clamoring for Lillard’s return and devising theories that could explain how his character is still alive.
Lillard insists that he’s not set to be in the seventh movie in the franchise, which is set to start filming in January, though he’s open to the idea that Stu didn’t die after all. That said, he’s wary of ruining the character’s legacy and would only return if it’s done right.
“It’s not something I consider. If they come to me then it’ll be a conversation. We never had the conversation,” he clarified.
With so much on the horizon, it’s hard for Lillard not to reflect on how far he’s come since he started his career at 22.
“I’ve gone through good patches and bad patches. I’ve been irrelevant and thought I was never going to work again,” he said.
“I’ve been at all aspects of the career, and I love where I’m at right this second.”
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