The Critical Role team has been living inside the mythical realm of Exandria for over a decade. What began as a Dungeons & Dragons actual-play stream populated by well-known voice actors has become one of the dominant forces in contemporary D&D, leading to multiple spin-offs—like the animated Prime Video series The Legend Of Vox Machina, which returns for its fourth season on Prime Video Wednesday, June 3. Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer and the cast who play the show’s eponymous party—Marisha Ray, Liam O’Brien, Laura Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Travis Willingham, and Sam Riegel—know their characters like the back of their hands. But, as they told The A.V. Club ahead of the season premiere, knowing and loving something doesn’t keep it from being challenging, or from presenting entirely new hurdles when a story that was improvised around a table is adapted into a scripted TV series.
With a coy smile, Riegel remarked on one such challenge: “Not being in some episodes was very challenging for me, to my ego, and also a challenge to the audience, really, ’cause I’m why they keep coming back.”
He’s right, of course: his lewd jokes and sly earnestnesshave made Riegel’s character, the gnome bard Scanlan Shorthalt, a fan favorite. And he’s also right about the make-up of season four. With the team split off all across the continent on their respective journeys, not every episode features every character.
“Our animators were very happy about that,” Bailey said with a laugh. Background characters and fantasy worlds are one thing, but having seven main characters is a lot of detail—especially considering the intricate style that Titmouse uses for The Legend Of Vox Machina and the animated version of Critical Role’s second campaign, The Mighty Nein.
Vox Machina is eventually reunited in season four, but, as Riegel mentioned, it’s still hard for the characters to be apart. Particularly when it comes to twins Vex’ahlia and Vax’ildan, the latter played by O’Brien.
“For Vex, it’s an interesting thing to be separate from Vax and to have an entire sort of life for a year without him and to be content in that, but also to miss him so dearly,” Bailey explained. “I think there was an interesting dynamic with them coming back together and having a lot of secrets from each other and not knowing how to share them again.”
Vex has this in common with her twin brother. However, Vax’s pact with the Matron of Death complicates things even further. They were able to resurrect Percy when he died in the third season, but the human gunslinger’s revival came at a cost. The Matron left Vax with a blight, and it hasn’t improved in the year since the team parted ways.
O’Brien reflected on where the new season finds Vax, who’s been adventuring alongside and deepening his relationship with the half-elf druid Keyleth and dealing with the consequences of the blight. “He’s trying to be there to support and do the things required of him despite how unsure he feels with everything going on,” O’Brien said.
“Unsure” could be the theme of the entire series. It certainly applies to season four: With the Chroma Conclave defeated, the team faces a new, unknown foe that threatens to be their greatest challenge yet. Though thematic weight and formidable adversaries will never stop this band of assholes from having a few laughs.
“We love trying to find levity in this season, which gets so heavy,” O’Brien explained. They’ve hit the mother lode with one of the newest additions to Vox Machina: Taryon Darrington, played by improviser extraordinaire Wayne Brady. Taryon, who was played by Riegel in the original campaign, is a lovable and frequently oblivious upstart who would be unbearably annoying without the impeccable comedic timing Brady and Riegel have each brought to the role. He manages to get on the nerves of every member of the party—Percy most of all, who’s particularly irked by the newcomer’s enthusiasm.
The actor playing Percy, however, felt differently. Jaffe said he had to make sure that it didn’t sound like he was falling in love with Taryon too quickly. “There comes a point where I’m like ‘Wow, I just really have to keep trying to be irritated by this lovable scamp.’”
“Wayne Brady just runs away with the season,” Willingham agreed. “We didn’t know if anybody could hold a candle to the immaculate Sam Riegel, but Jesus H. Macy, Wayne came in and said ‘hold my beer.’ He’s been an absolute phenom.”
They’re somehow underselling how funny Brady is as Taryon. What is undoubtedly the heaviest stretch of The Legend Of Vox Machina to date also had me belly laughing more than any prior season. Brady credits his performance, and his involvement in the show, entirely to Riegel, who was his voice coach for Disney’s Sophia The First. The self-proclaimed “ huge animation, sci-fi, fantasy nerd boy,” recalled locking into The Legend Of Vox Machina’s universe immediately, and joked that he was “incredibly jealous” that he wasn’t on the show.
“So a couple of years later, Sam reaches out to me and says ‘Wayne, I’ve got this character and his name is Taryon Darrington,’” Brady said. “And I’m like ‘Yes. When do you want me there? When can I start? Let’s go.’
“It was the coolest thing to be asked to be part of these guys, because I look at Critical Role as an improvisation troupe that just happens to play D&D. We’re all in the same tribe of musicians and actors and improvisers. We come from the same place. So to play make believe in their world with a character that Sam had already created, and that I was being blessed with and told just to do my thing was the best of both worlds. You can always get a job, but you don’t always get an opportunity.”
Given the time that’s passed between the events of seasons three and four, the dynamics within Vox Machina would’ve shifted with or without Taryon tagging along. Willingham called it “a real delight and also a struggle to play.”
“We kind of had to remind ourselves that it can’t always be the best of vibes,” he said. “There has to be some of that tension in the different pursuits that they’ve taken in the time spent between seasons.”
Image: Prime Video
For Keyleth, that time was spent in the most loving and challenging year of her life. She has Vax fiercely backing her up, but she also has the seemingly impossible task of completing the odyssey her people call Aramente. The final trial that the half-elf faces in season four wasn’t just a challenge for the character, but for Ray herself as a performer. She recalled how this portion of the original campaign played out during a live episode of Critical Role, which amplified the stress levels of what Ray described as a “really bad day.”
“I walked out of the sound stage and immediately burst into tears,” Ray said. “Going back and revisiting that and encapsulating just how stressful the whole challenge was, it’s raw.”
Johnson, meanwhile, was experiencing events she’d missed the first time around. Her role on the NBC drama Blindspot coincided withthe original campaign, so she couldn’t be around to play the gnome cleric Pike as much as she wanted to. Johnson said it was important for her to do justice to Pike’s story because she was gone for so long.
“We got to tell this story about her crisis of faith and this whole sort of emotional journey that she’s on,” she said. “It was almost better in a way than what we were able to in the campaign because I wasn’t here all the time. So being in the booth and having to be very serious and emotional and yell at my friends, that’s not fun. But, you know, we work it out!”
Whether or not it does work out, we have more Pikey, and that’s a net win. What makes this new version of the story so fun is that while the Critical Role team wants to honor the original campaign and the Critters who have been with them from the beginning, they’ve always made sure that The Legend Of Vox Machina stands entirely on its own, without depending on a decade’s worth of Critical Role lore. For Mercer, the challenge and the joy of season four was about the adaptation of it all.
“These reveals that were once communal, we now get to have [the characters] meet them through different perspectives and see how that kind of sends its own bolt of electricity through the rest of the party as they’re starting to reform. For me, one of the exciting challenges was seeing how we could layer in the fractured now of Vox Machina while still having these beats hit even more intensely than before and use that as an anchor to bring them all together. It was a fun journey to develop that version of this story.”
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