“I’ve never had this much authorship over anything in my life.”
That is how Critical Role star and co-founder Liam O’Brien describes the first season of “The Mighty Nein.” The new series, the second animated collaboration between the multi-platform entertainment phenomenon and Amazon, premiered Wednesday on Prime Video. It is coming three years after the company’s first scripted series, “The Legend of Vox Machina,” made its exuberant debut and quickly won over existing Critical Role fans and ensnared plenty newbies as well.
O’Brien’s comment may come as a surprise to some Critical Role viewers, given that “The Legend of Vox Machina” is just as faithful an adaptation of its original, live-streamed Dungeons & Dragons campaign as “The Mighty Nein.” But the latter is deeper, darker and more expansive. Its episodes run 45 minutes each, as opposed to the 22 minutes afforded to individual “Vox Machina” installments. Furthermore, Critical Role’s second campaign began with its stars more settled in. They came to the table more prepared and ambitious than before.
That feeling is reflected in “The Mighty Nein.”
“With ‘Legend of Vox Machina,’ we had these 22-minute episodes and were really cramming a lot of story in there,” Critical Role star and CEO Travis Willingham told TheWrap. With “The Mighty Nein,” the cast wanted more “runway” this time. Willingham added, “The settings are more complex. The storylines are more intricate.”
“The Legend of Vox Machina” was itself the result of a record-breaking, fan-funded Kickstarter. As such, there is a sense in its early episodes that the people making it could not believe they had been given the chance to do so. That sensation, which Critical Role star and creative director Marisha Ray called “not wrong,” isn’t present in “The Mighty Nein.” In its place is an astonishing level of confidence, especially for a series with such unlikely origins.
“I think, especially with ‘Vox Machina,’ we went into it thinking, ‘How can we leave this so that it would still feel kind of okay if it doesn’t perform well and we don’t get picked up again?’” Ray reflected. “With this, we were more secure, so we were able to relax into the chair a bit more here.”
“It was really a combination of two things,” Willingham noted. “What we learned from the smaller format of ‘Vox Machina’ and the desire we felt to take a bigger swing this time.”
Enter: The Mighty Nein
“The Mighty Nein” gave the Critical Role team the chance to revisit the origins of its characters for the first time in years. For Ray, it meant getting to return to the detective roots that inspired her cocky monk, Beauregard Lionett, in the first place. “The idea of this investigator monk who is devoted to the idea of protecting and holding knowledge sacred, that’s what drew me in, literally, when we were building these characters way back in the day,” Ray revealed, describing the show’s depiction of Beau’s investigative ways as a “full-circle moment.”
Beau is one of the first characters introduced in the “Mighty Nein” premiere, which also introduces viewers early to disheveled wizard Caleb Widogast (O’Brien) and goblin rogue Nott the Brave (Sam Riegel), who quickly become an unlikely pair. The latter character, a female goblin, demands that Riegel adopt a high-pitched, shrieky voice he never intended to spend seven years doing. “It’s not super hard to do because it’s mostly falsetto, but to make it sound believably high enough is a trick,” Riegel told TheWrap with a laugh. “It gets harder and harder with every year. Luckily, I’ve had a lot of practice doing it.”
Viewers meet Nott, Beau and Caleb earlier in “The Mighty Nein” than they did in Critical Role’s second campaign, and the same is true of Willingham’s Fjord Stone. That means viewers get to see Fjord assume the false sea captain persona and Southern accent he already had when Critical Role fans first met him. “Something we discussed was, ‘What are the benefits of going back?’” Willingham said, explaining the creative decision. “We wanted to set up how Fjord represents himself not just through a flashback or through an accent slip, but by getting to actually see what world he comes from and where his insecurities lie.”
More time, more space
For fellow Critical Role star Taliesin Jaffe, “The Mighty Nein” Season 1 provided the rare opportunity to spend more time with purple-skinned tarot reader Mollymauk Tealeaf than he got in Critical Role’s second campaign.
“It’s nice having space. You would think that having five-hour D&D episodes would give you a lot of space, but not always,” Jaffe told TheWrap. “To finally sit down and have those conversations as Molly that I missed because maybe the scenes were moving a little too quickly when we were creating them in the moment is just so rewarding.”
“By the end of the season, I turned to Taliesin, and I was like, ‘It’s so damn good. People are gonna absolutely love Molly,’” Willingham enthusiastically added.
Of course, few characters in “The Mighty Nein” cast as large of a shadow in the Critical Role fandom than Laura Bailey’s blue-skinned cleric, Jester Lavorre, whose dirty mind and infectious exuberance made her an instant fan-favorite. “I was nervous going in that she wasn’t going to be showcased the way that I envisioned her or played her originally,” Bailey revealed to TheWrap, reflecting on the early developmental stages of “The Mighty Nein.” It was only after she read some of showrunner Tasha Huo’s scripts for the series that her nerves faded away.
“She and the rest of the writers really understood Jester’s motivations. They never made her too frivolous,” Bailey said. “She has so much depth hiding behind the chaos, and I was so happy with the way she was portrayed … Then we would get in the recording booth and it would just turn into whatever the f—k came out! [Laughs] She is her own personality within my brain now.”
A new perspective
In addition to introducing its core heroes, “The Mighty Nein” Season 1 spends considerable time with Essek Theylss, a drow wizard who was not introduced until much later in Critical Role’s second campaign. He is voiced in the series by Critical Role CCO and founding Game Master Matthew Mercer, who up until now has had his choice of supporting characters to portray in both “Vox Machina” and “The Mighty Nein.”
“Of all the NPCs we played through in the campaign, Essek was the one who was most central to the Mighty Nein’s story, so I got to spend a lot of meaningful time with him,” Mercer said. “I wanted the opportunity to step into the ring with the rest of my friends and be a major player this time.”
Not only do viewers meet Essek sooner in “The Mighty Nein,” but his motivations are also revealed far earlier. According to Huo, that was a creative divergence she felt drawn to early on. “Something I really loved about Essek when I was watching the live show was how closed off he was to people and how much he believed he was this one thing, which was a bad person who did not deserve friends,” Huo noted. “I think his arc will be felt in such a more intense way in the show if you get to see where he’s coming from first and why he thinks he’s this person.”
Entering uncharted waters
Essek’s scenes do not represent the only major change “The Mighty Nein” makes to its source material. It also radically rewrites the journey of barbarian Yasha Nydoorin (Ashley Johnson), which Johnson said was the result of discussions early in the show’s development process. “It just made sense as time went on that Yasha’s introduction to this group be a little different,” the actress told TheWrap.
“Yasha’s arc is still the same,” she clarified. “Her introduction is just more dramatic this time, which I think makes sense for her story.”
If Critical Role fans feel uncomfortable at first with these changes, that is okay with its creators. “For folks that really know Campaign 2, the question was, ‘How can we surprise them?’ How can we make them realize that some of this is different? That this is uncharted waters?” Willingham divulged. “That’s perfect for us as creators. We want to surprise you, while also paying homage to who these characters are and where the story needs to go.”
The sheer size of the show’s ensemble means viewers can expect to know more about certain characters’ pasts than others by the time “The Mighty Nein” Season 1 has come to an end. “The challenge with a lot of this is: How much do you reveal and when do you reveal it?” Riegel said. “With so many characters, you kind of have to pick and choose and ask, ‘Whose season is this?’”
In the case of “The Mighty Nein” Season 1, Riegel observed, “This is definitely Caleb’s season.”
He is not wrong. O’Brien’s character, whose backstory was meticulously designed by the actor before he even sat down to play him for the first time, is at the center of many of the biggest moments “The Mighty Nein” Season 1 has to offer. For O’Brien, seeing Caleb’s story explored and fully realized onscreen goes back to the greater sense of authorship he feels toward “The Mighty Nein” than he even did with “The Legend of Vox Machina.”
“It has been indescribable. The show is an effort of love by many, many people,” O’Brien noted. “But the fact that I got to create a character from top to bottom as complicated as this and to have so many expert artists come in with such care to help craft scripts and create music and visuals to support this story — I am so grateful. Critical Role and the character of Caleb surpass anything else that I’ve done in my life creatively. I’m thanking the universe every day.”
New episodes of “The Mighty Nein” Season 1 premiere Wednesday nights on Amazon’s Prime Video.
