THE MIGHTY NEIN Series Will Flesh Out Essek (And His War Crimes), Shares Showrunner

We support a hot, angsty drow’s rights to wrongs. We truly do. And so, we’re very excited to see The Mighty Nein‘s beloved NPC Essek, played by Matt Mercer in the campaign, join the animated TV series as a full-fledged main character in his own right. Of course, that means we’ll be seeing more of all parts of Essek, the good, the bad, the hot, the sad, and… the war criminal. Gulp! But that’s the price we pay for getting more, and a more evolved form, of one of our favorite characters. Nerdist sat down with The Mighty Nein TV series’ showrunner, Tasha Huo, and she gave us a tease of what’s to come for us and Essek in the campaign. Here’s what we learned.

Transforming Critical Role‘s The Mighty Nein campaign into a TV series gives the storytellers the freedom to get into storylines and arcs that the player characters of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign could never have been a part of. In this case, Tasha Huo shares, it means the ability to bring to life Essek’s story. When asked what part of the campaign’s story that we didn’t get to see in the original telling she was most excited to show on screen in The Mighty Nein, Huo immediately went to Essek.

She revealed, “I would say pretty much all of the Essek stuff, because all of that was just sort of told to us way late in the campaign and you’re like, wait, there’s this whole storyline that exists and just because the players didn’t go down that path, we didn’t get to see, well, how about we see that now? So that’s super fun.”

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In a campaign, we must follow our player characters where they lead. But in a TV show, the camera can fly all around and go backward and forward in time as desired. It can also visit with characters that were once NPCs. In The Mighty Nein TV series, Matt Mercer’s Essek will move from an NPC to a main character and get both the good and the bad of what that entails.

Huo discussed the journey of evolving Essek’s character and shared, “Yeah, I mean, you really have to start asking a lot of questions, the way any writer would, about what he was thinking in this moment? What was he feeling? Why did he make the choices that he did? And I love so much his arc of becoming ultimately Caleb’s greatest love. But that arc is so fascinating, and I want to start at the beginning of that, right? And really see him make those really bad choices because when we meet him, he’s never felt love, and he is a sad hot boy, and he’s done really terrible things. I remember when Matt Mercer, in the live show, he talked about how, basically, Essek is a war criminal. And, I was like, wait, but we didn’t get to see any of that.”

Be careful what you wish for, Essek fans. It’s one thing to hear that Essek has committed all kinds of atrocities and quite another to see them come to life in The Mighty Nein‘s TV series. It sounds like getting more of our favorite drow will mean really having to strap in for all the evil Matt Mercer’s Essek gets up to in The Mighty Nein. But like we said, we support a drow’s rights to wrongs, and we support him on his journey to atone for them, find love, and more.

We tell Huo that we love a hot angsty drow, and she laughs and says, “You’re going to get a lot of it in The Mighty Nein. It’ll be great.” Well, we can’t wait to see all the Essek we can get very soon. And yes, Matt Mercer will voice Essek in The Mighty Nein TV series.

Prime Video’s newest Critical Role series, The Mighty Nein, releases on November 19, 2025. It will debut with its first three episodes. In the meantime, you can watch The Mighty Nein campaign from the start today.

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