The Mighty Nein Cast Break Down the Changes, Challenges, and Triumphs of Bringing Their Second Campaign to the Small Screen 

After the smash-hit first season of The Legend of Vox Machina premiered, it was only a matter of time before Prime Video announced its next collaboration with Critical Role. The long-running tabletop roleplay series is now four campaigns deep, and with plenty of material spanning back an entire decade, Prime jumping to adapt the group’s second campaign was no surprise. 

When an ancient artifact is stolen, the continent of Wildemount is on the brink of a long-lasting, brutal war. With so much at stake, a group of unlikely heroes work along the outskirts of the conflict, finding both unexpected connection and inspiration as their disparate adventures converge. The Mighty Nein follows disgraced wizard Caleb (Liam O’Brien), goblin Nott (Sam Riegel), seaman Fjord (Travis Willingham), monk Beau (Marisha Ray), wide-eyed Jester (Laura Bailey), carny Mollymauk (Taliesin Jaffe), and the mysterious Yasha (Ashley Johnson) as they each chase their own individual ends—and maybe, accidentally, save the realm along the way. 

Separated from the high-flying and more classically fantastical land of Tal’Dorei and the comedic tone of The Legend of Vox Machina, The Mighty Nein pushes the bounds of adaptation by bringing Critical Role’s iconic characters and stories into a proper hour-long drama teeming with political intrigue, complicated characters, and jaw-dropping moments. Paste sat down with the cast and executive producers to discuss The Mighty Nein’s distinct identity separate from Vox Machina, and unpack the instantly iconic characters at the heart of the series. 

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Paste Magazine: This show feels like an outlier in our current animation space because it gets to be a proper 45-min drama. Why was it important that The Mighty Nein be structurally different from The Legend of Vox Machina in that way? 

Travis Willingham: There’s so much story here. The characters are so complex, and we knew we had a ton of story to tell. In Vox Machina, we really tried to cram a lot of things in the episodes, and we found ourselves constrained, pushing against the limits of that 22-minute format. When we were able to secure 44 [minutes], we knew we had a bit more runway for these stories, and I think we’re taking a bit more of a patient approach.

The world is so big, and it’s a big buy-in—there’s a lot of things people are going to have to chew on and digest, and figure out how that makes them feel about the things that are being introduced episode after episode, so I think that was the biggest change going forward. We want to pay homage to the Mighty Nein, do it right, set up the world in a way that makes sense (from an audience perspective), and hopefully deliver some thrills for people who think they know everything there is to know about the Mighty Nein. 

Sam Riegel: We did a few things to make sure that it wasn’t the exact same series because if we were making the same exact series as Legend of Vox Machina, there’s no reason to make another series. It’s already good and it’s already on the air!

So we wanted to separate it out in as many distinct ways as possible, but I think the main reason that we shot for hour-long episodes for Mighty Nein is because the backstories and the side stories—the villains, the politics and political intrigue, the war, all that stuff that is going to factor into the Mighty Nein’s story—is constantly going on in the background and we wanted to have an opportunity to show those scenes and to tell that story. Without knowing [that background information], it’s a much smaller story, and it’s not really the [Mighty Nein’s] story. I’m so grateful that Prime Video was able to give us hour-long slots because it makes for a much richer world. 

Paste: Speaking of which, this series begins not with the Mighty Nein themselves, but instead, with a ritual. What was it like to take all the elements and movements that were brewing in the background of the original campaign and bring them to the foreground? 

Matthew Mercer: That’s one of the coolest things about this series, to me. As a Dungeon Master, as a person who’s running a tabletop game and building these worlds, there’s so many facets that exist in my imagination that I can allude to, and occasionally show, as the players are playing through and hope to get them inspired to want to dig deeper into the story, but a lot of this lore exists outside of their experience. So now, in this animated medium, to collaborate with all the wonderful animation teams and storyboard artists and designers and bring them to visual life is such a cool thing! It’s hard to find the words to describe how giddy and proud and overwhelmed I am to see all these things visually expressed in ways that are far cooler than I could have even imagined. [I am] very, very grateful and humbled and excited. 

Liam O’Brien: I’m obsessed with the Kryn Dyasty in the show. The vibes are immaculate. 

Paste: Now diving into the characters, from the very first scene, it’s clear that Fjord has no idea who he is—even before he gets bestowed with magical powers. Travis, can you speak to his journey of self-discovery throughout the season? Why is that element so fundamental to his character?

Willingham: Something that was so interesting to me when I started playing Fjord is [he is] someone that is more ordinary in a fantasy world, who has no extraordinary powers, doesn’t have any abilities, he is just a hand on the deck of a ship. And because of his circumstances, he wakes up on a beach and, suddenly, things are starting to change. How do you grapple with that? What does one do when you’re trying to uncover more knowledge about where the origin of these powers come from? How do you interact with people? What does it do when power hits you? Does it change you as a person? So that’s a really fun thing to explore, but it’s another thing when it hits a, I would say, not very confident apparatus. Fjord is trying to figure out what works for him and what the world is about, and he is as naive as he is green, so I think that’s just a really fun thing to explore and to see. I think we are all very lucky that he hits the chaos goblin that is Jester so quickly because there’s nothing like a little chaos to shake up someone who’s on shaky ground [Laughs]. 

Paste: Speaking of which, we meet Jester at her most bubbly and her most naive at the start of the season. Having spent so long with this character, what was it like to revisit Jester at the very start of her journey, and did you learn anything new about the character along the way?

Laura Bailey: It was actually really fun to get to go back to the beginning with her. As she’s progressed through her story in our later years, I feel like she still has that bubbly joy, but it’s a bit more grounded, and I love, in the early years, that she’s just—she’s everywhere! [Laughs] She has no base of what is too much, so we really got to explore that. And I think the animators have just done such an amazing job of showing that, even outside of the performance that we gave, they let all the little moments in between breathe. You can really see her microexpressions, and it gives so much more character. I am obsessed. 

Paste: In a similar vein, watching this season felt like getting a second chance with Mollymauk, who was very infamously killed just 26 episodes into the original campaign. What was it like to revisit this specific version of a character that has since lived so many lives in the continued Critical Role canon? 

Taliesin Jaffe: There was no inevitability the first time we did this, and knowing the inevitability, there is time to pace and start to talk about where this character is going and where they are. It was so nice to not just have this one day where I’m like “Oh, wait! No! Oh no… We’ll have to get back to that later!” So having the time and the space to really hit those moments and put in all these things and let him breathe in a way that sometimes a game doesn’t allow was really just so rewarding. 

Paste: Because this group doesn’t begin as friends like Vox Machina, there is so much tension between these characters, especially Beau and Caleb. Marisha, can you speak to Beau’s headspace at the beginning of the season and why she’s so slow to trust? 

Marisha Ray: [Her trust level is] negative one. [Laughs] Beau is so singularly focused on her mission and honestly, probably there’s a little bit of pretentiousness with her and a bit of self-importance that she has been put on this path by this renowned institution of the Cobalt Soul. She quickly realizes that she is going to need help, and these people can at least help get her closer to her goal. Of course, as time goes on, it’s revealed that Beau and Caleb actually share a similar goal, it’s just the means to the end that differs for them. There’s a mutual distrust there, but I think that’s important [for their stories throughout the season]. 

Paste: The relationship between Nott and Caleb is undoubtedly the heart of the season. What does Caleb represent to Nott at the beginning of the season, and how can fans expect to see their relationship evolve? 

Riegel: For both of them, but especially Nott, they just haven’t had a friend in a while. Caleb [and] Nott have been either rejected by others, on the run from their own shame, or both. So, just having someone who doesn’t judge them, who isn’t scared of them, and who is just willing to talk to them as another person is a ray of hope for both Caleb and Nott. I’ll let Liam speak to what Caleb sees in Nott, but at the beginning, there’s a spark of normalcy. And maybe, in a way, that’s what the Mighty Nein sees in each other across the board. They’re all on the run from something, and when they meet each other, they might not be friends, but they at least meet people who don’t immediately toss them aside or judge them. And that’s sometimes all we need. 

O’Brien: The other half of that is that I think Caleb thinks he’s unworthy of friendship, and Nott, being the good, stealthy little goblin that she is, sneaks past his defenses almost against his will and opens up friendship and kindness to him when he just didn’t think he was deserving of it anymore. 

Paste: Similarly, we see so much of Caleb’s backstory throughout this season, but before we learn a single thing about his past, we learn that Nott trusts Caleb. Why was it important to start with those two and hammer that relationship home right from the start? 

O’Brien: It’s interesting trying to pace out our first season with these characters and exploring how they all came together. It’s really hard to try to shove an entire backstory from the jump into someone’s face, so we had to design it to dribble out bit by bit by bit. All of these characters’ stories are a lot to digest, so it was carefully crafted, the “How?” and “How fast?” But for Caleb and Nott specifically, we want the audience to know as little about them as they know about each other, so that we’re watching them circle each other and understand each other as they learn with time as the audience does. 

Paste: At New York Comic Con and in other interviews, you’ve prefaced the season by saying that it’s different, but you’re happy with where you landed in Yasha’s particular journey. Why has it been important to make that distinction before the show aired? 

Ashley Johnson: Telling a story around a table and then trying to transfer that to an animated series, there’s a lot of stuff we can’t do or wouldn’t be interesting to watch or wouldn’t make sense in a linear story. You’re all telling a story at the same exact time, as opposed to being able to weave through someone’s story like we do with Essek and getting to see stuff that we didn’t see in the game but now we can. So with Yasha, we really worked on trying to figure out how her narrative would make sense. For anyone who knows her story, which has not changed, we know the weight and the heaviness that she is carrying with her. Give it time, but I really love what we’ve been able to do with her story, and hopefully what we’ll be able to continue to do if we get to go more seasons. 

The Mighty Nein premieres November 19th on Prime Video. 

Anna Govert is an editor, critic, and TV obsessive whose work has appeared in Xtra Magazine, Polygon, Paste Magazine, The AV Club, and more. For any and all thoughts about TV, film, and her unshakable love of complicated female villains, you can follow her @annagovert. 

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