‘The Mighty Nein’ Team Tease Series — And That Fan Favorite Character

Prepare to meet The Mighty Nein — they may not be the heroes you expect to save the world, but you can be darn sure they’re going to do their best.

On November 19, Prime Video will debut the newest animated series in Critical Role’s ever-expanding universe of Exandria, adapted from the mega-popular web series’ second tabletop campaign of the same name that ran from 2018 to 2021. Similar to the characters in Critical Role and Prime Video’s first animated series, The Legend of Vox Machina, each member of the adventuring party comes complete with their own messy flaws. But despite elements that remain the same — magical threats, found family, trademark humor — fans should expect to see a markedly different (and darker) story with certain changes, such as episode lengths, reflecting that.

“Every time we run into a problem with Vox Machina, it’s something that could be solved with one or two more minutes of screen time,” admits Sam Riegel, who, in addition to serving as an executive producer on The Mighty Nein (and The Legend of Vox Machina), voices an alcoholic and co-dependent goblin girl named Nott The Brave. “We’ve always thought, man, I wish we had just a few more minutes to tell our stories.”

The Mighty Nein grants that wish, expanding episodes from half an hour to one hour, which allows for those deeper looks into character development, relationships, and lore. “We were like, it’s much more in-depth, the characters are more sophisticated, the backstories are much more important, the machinations of the politics and the villains are much more interlaced with the story,” says Riegel about pitching the series to Prime Video. “And we just found that it probably wouldn’t work as a 22-minute show.”

Traveling alongside Riegel’s Nott through the world of Wildemount are a chaos crew of misfit antiheroes, each saddled with their own traumas and hangups: mischievous Jester Lavorre (Laura Bailey), shipwrecked and orphaned half-orc warlock Fjord Stone (Travis Willingham), unkempt haunted wizard Caleb (Liam O’Brien), Cobalt Soul monk Beauregard Lionett (Marisha Ray), barbarian/mercenary Yasha Nydoorin (Ashley Johnson) and traveling circus tarot card reader Mollymauk Tealeaf (Taliesin Jaffe). They may not like each other (at first) but when a stolen arcane relic known as “The Beacon” threatens to tear reality apart, the group (reluctantly) takes on the responsibility of saving the world together.

With the collision of vastly different personalities and Dungeons & Dragons classes, combined with a narrative that’s deeply character-driven, showrunner and executive producer Tasha Huo (a self-proclaimed Critter whose resume includes Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft) knew the show needed to place an emphasis on every party member’s unique magical abilities.

“I think they did a great job in the actual campaign of setting us up for this kind of success because they delved into their characters so much that it couldn’t help but be character-driven,” says Huo. “Like Liam, he plays a wizard. If anyone plays D&D, that could go a million different ways, but fire magic became a very key part of him. The components were very integral to how he did everything, and everything was a step-by-step process, and it became a part of who he was and how he saw the world. Was it a challenge? Yes, because you’ve not seen that kind of specificity in magic before in shows. We very deliberately remember in the writer’s room when we were thinking about magic, we’re like, we’ve all seen the show where we throw out our hand and magic comes out, and we’re sick of it! We want something new and fresh and fun! And it was easy to say, well, let’s go back to the characters for that.”

Prime Video

When the Critical Role cast originally went to work on The Legend of Vox Machina, they were deep into their third tabletop campaign (“Bells Hells”) and it had been years since they’d stepped into their characters skin. Preparing to put The Mighty Nein into the world, Riegel says, was no different. “We get to go back and revisit these characters with different perspective, and knowing where they end up certainly affects how we portray them at the beginning of their stories,” he explains. “But it was just going back to try to put myself in my own skin of what it was like to play [Nott] early in the campaign, sort of like a little time travel, and to try to remember how weird and nervous and jittery and unsure and very, very reliant on Caleb she was. I don’t think I changed anything. The one thing that we have stressed about a lot is just making sure that the character sounds like me, but also sounds a little bit more feminine than me. I do a little bit higher pitch when I do the voice, and then we’ve also used some digital tricks to sort of make me seem just a hair more feminine in voice.”

With 141 campaign episodes to adapt (compared to Vox Machina’s 115), the cast worked hard to make sure they could deliver the right balance of storytelling and fan service throughout this first season. That meant, among other things, a more nuanced look into Essek Thelyss, an elf wizard voiced by Matthew Mercer who is pivotal to The Nein’s hero journey. So: is everyone who works on the series ready for the world to become even more obsessed with, as he’s affectionally referred to by fans, “Hot Boi” Essek?

According to Riegel, absolutely.

“The earliest design meetings we ever had, we were like, this guy’s gotta be super hot, everybody!” Riegel laughs. “But luckily, most of the design team, they sweat him even more than we do. Like, everybody has a crush on Essek. And it was not hard to find a hundred different artists ready and willing to draw him very appealing to the eye.” Physical appearances aside, Riegel both teases and warns fans that they should expect some drastic changes. “It’s a real gift, it’s a joy to be able to expand his role because he’s so pivotal, but also so complicated, and we get to see him being bad a little bit in this season,” he hints. “I will say, though, that his storyline is not the only change, and avid enjoyers of Campaign 2 should buckle up, because the story does shift and flop around in big ways throughout the entire series—partially because of the constraints of television and season lengths, but also partially because we wanted to really streamline the show and be able to focus on characters like Trent Icathon [a powerful figure from Caleb’s past] and Essek and focus on a lot more characters. And that meant sort of rearranging the timeline a little bit.”

Prime Video

Fear not, though—Huo promises that everything has been brought to life with the utmost care, even if things like character designs have changed in the transition from official art to animation (the absence of Mollymauk’s intricately detailed coat, for example, is a casualty fans have already picked up on). “I’m not sure we’ve lost anything because we thought we can’t animate that. I think we’ve pushed the boundaries on that as everywhere we could. And it is my mission in life to make sure that we don’t lose things that we all love from the campaign in this show. There’s nothing that felt integral to what we loved or fell in love with, whether it’s moments or characters, or even jokes, that we left on the cutting room floor that felt like, God, if we only had 12 more episodes, we could do this,” she explains. “And it’s because I think we really worked hard on bringing the spirit of scenes that we all remember and love, the spirit of jokes and all these characters, whether it’s exactly how it came out in the campaign or not.”

And like episodes of The Legend of Vox Machina, added their input where they could. “The entire writer’s room was stacked with ace-level writers led by none other than Tasha, so we didn’t feel like we needed to write any of [the episodes],” says Riegel. He did, however, pick up the reins on the fourth hour along with Willingham when timing intervened, which also happens to be the first episode where, he teases, “the whole team sort of comes together.”

“When the team finally comes together and they fight for the first time together as the Mighty Nien was a holy s**t moment, I think, for all of us,” says Huo, adding that Nott and Caleb’s first meeting, as well as the character of Jester, were among her favorite moments. “Our show is so grounded, but Jester was the one place we allowed ourselves to really lean into some animation tropes, because that’s just who she is.” For Riegel, it was “seeing some of those early, epic fights that Matt had described in the live play—seeing those come to life, seeing the Fletching and Moondrop Carnival come to life. And Jester has always been so fun to listen to when Laura does it and to see cosplayers dress up as Jester, and now to see Jester fully realized, moving, with all of her cuteness and her perfect voice and her doodles and her sketchbook and everything, that’s just so fun.”

Among the joy, there was also emotion—the kind that comes with long-term friendships. “When Caleb and Nott introduce each other and meet for the first time, I looked over at Liam, and he was just sobbing in the booth, and that was pretty, pretty special to see,” Riegel shares. “Because, you know, this took years and years and years to get going, and we feel so connected to these characters, and especially Liam to Caleb. And so when he got to say my name’s Caleb Widogast, that was just so special.”

For Riegel, sharing the show in this way all about what Critical Role has come to mean to the group of voice actors whose lives were changed over a decade ago just from sitting around a table, rolling a dice. “The night that we shot the first episode of Campaign 2, we were just all nervous,” he remembers. “What voice are you gonna do? And do we remember how to play? And all these new rules that we have to learn and new spells and things. And so, now we get to just focus on just the characters and the dynamic in the group, and it’s so fun to revisit.”

The Mighty Nein, Series Premiere, November 19, Prime Video

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