“I thought I would never work again”

• Matthew Lillard had his biggest payday ever with Scooby-Doo 2, but the film flopped.

• The response to the film changed the course of his career and prompted him to make a completely new start.

• Lillard still works as an actor, but is now also an entrepreneur with his own liquor company.

In the mid-2000s, Matthew Lillard's career reached a new height.

He starred in a Warner Bros. franchise based on the popular title Scooby-Doo and had just completed the sequel, giving him his biggest payday yet. He and his family lived in a big house and drove expensive cars. He had finally done it.

“I thought I was No. 1 on the list of movies for the next decade,” Lillard told Business Insider. “And in reality, the exact opposite happened.”

The film that gave him the big payday, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, ended up being a critical flop that underperformed at the box office, leading Warner Bros. to cancel its plans for a third film . Suddenly, Lillard's plans for his future were also canceled.

Instead of his career and paychecks growing exponentially, what followed was a years-long hiatus and some downsizing. It took this reckoning and many years of reflection for Lillard to rethink how he views happiness and success.

Two decades later, Lillard is happier than ever. He's still acting and returns for the sequel to the box office hit Five Nights At Freddy's. He also went into business and started his own spirits company, Find Familiar Spirits.

“One of the greatest moments in my life is realizing that I have power beyond my role as an actor,” Lillard said. “That was much more satisfying for me than getting a role in a movie.”

Lillard refocused his career when job offers dried up after “Scooby-Doo 2.”

Before “Scooby-Doo,” Lillard’s career was mixed.

After his breakthrough in John Waters' 1994 black comedy “Serial Mom,” about a housewife who is secretly a serial killer, he gained indie credibility with starring roles in films such as 1998's “SLC Punk!” and was in major studio films such as the first “Scream” film and “She's All That”.

Back then, he was still sensitive to public feedback: he read all the (often not great) reviews and even stopped by movie theaters to see if anyone would recognize him.

“I was caught up in the success of my work, I was caught up in the roles I was getting, I was caught up in this drive to be famous,” Lillard remembers.

But his disappointments early in his career didn't shake him up as much as the response to “Scooby-Doo 2.” As an actor back in his mid-30s, it was time to find his niche as a character actor or become a leading man. The film's failure showed that it had done neither.

While Lillard continued to work, voicing Shaggy in new “Scooby-Doo” animated projects and even making his own directorial debut with the 2012 coming-of-age drama “Fat Kid Rules the World,” it wasn't the career he wanted had expected one that gave him pleasure.

This feeling crystallized when his team made him an offer to appear on a popular reality competition series where his acting career failed.

“I wanted to do 'Dancing with the Stars.' And I thought, if I do 'Dancing with the Stars,' I'm never going to win an Oscar,” Lillard recalls. “If I do 'Dancing with the Stars,' I'm going to be famous and not a great actor, and I really just wanted to be a great actor.”

So he decided to get rid of his entire team and went back to his first agent: “I said, 'I just want to be an actor. I just want to act in films. I want to redefine my expectations.'”

The reset happened on a grand scale. In addition to getting rid of his family's fancy cars and moving to a smaller house, Lillard's wife went back to work and Lillard started taking acting classes again.

“I started looking for other things in my life than just acting,” Lillard said. That, in turn, led him to his latest venture.

Lillard's spirits company, Find Familiar Spirits, caters to his favorite fandoms

Lillard's entry into the spirits industry began about two years ago when he co-founded his spirits company Find Familiar Spirits, which uses some of his favorite fandoms as inspiration for high-quality spirits products.

An avid tabletop gamer, Lillard released his first whiskey series, Quest's End, which was inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. The company's second brand, Macabre Spirits, launched this month with a tequila reposado aimed at another community close to Lillard's heart: horror fans. He even worked with Mike Flanagan, creator of The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, for the launch; Each bottle of Macabre contains a horror novella by Flanagan.

“It’s an homage and a love letter to a kind of gothic sense of storytelling,” Lillard said.

Lillard's collaboration with Flanagan was fruitful on several levels. Just as Flanagan appeared in Lillard's spirits project, Lillard will soon play a small but significant role in one of Flanagan's films: “The Life of Chuck.” The film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, won the festival's People's Choice Award and will be released in theaters in spring 2025.

Lillard has several major film projects planned – and he isn't ruling out a return of “Scream.”

Having found a niche in horror films, Lillard is now in something of a renaissance era.

He's back directing the sequel to the hugely successful 2023 horror film Five Nights at Freddy's, which grossed $297.1 million on a $20 million budget. Based on the video game series of the same name, Lillard plays William Afton, the villain at the center of the story.

The success of the first film catapulted him back into the spotlight, but ironically Lillard had no idea how big the film would end up being, describing taking on the role as a leap of faith.

“I think I had two lines in the original script,” recalls Lillard, who was courted for the role by director Emma Tammi. He wasn't even sure at first why she wanted him in it, until Tammi explained that the story was designed as a film trilogy and his character would become more important as the series progressed. The sequel is due out next year.

Lillard also hasn't closed the door on a return to another iconic horror franchise – “Scream.”

Although his character Stu Macher died at the end of the first film, which was released in 1996, fans are clamoring for Lillard's return and developing theories that could explain why his character is still alive.

Lillard insists he will not star in the seventh film in the series, which is scheduled to begin filming in January, although he is open to the idea that Stu didn't die after all. However, he is wary of ruining the character's legacy and would only return if done right.

“It’s not something I think about. When they come to me it will be a conversation. We never talked about it,” he clarified.

With so much on the horizon, it's hard for Lillard not to think about how far he's come since he began his career at 22 years old.

“I went through good and bad phases. I was irrelevant and thought I would never work again,” he said.

“I’ve experienced all aspects of my career and I love where I’m at right now.”

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