Matthew Lillard is a phenomenal character actor who probably portrayed some of your favs throughout your childhood. From Scooby-Doo and Scream to recently Five Nights at Freddy’s, Lillard is always a joy to watch on screen. That’s why it was awesome to see our associate Johna talk to Matthew Lillard himself and for a cool reason. Check out Johna’s interview where she speaks to Lillard about his whiskey through his company Find Familiar Spirits. And the cool thing is, this whiskey has DnD ties.
Check it out!
Johna: I am here with the legend, Matthew Lillard. The reason I’m talking to Matthew today is because of his new whiskey, which sounds delicious and it would burn a little bit on the way down. It’s called Sand Kegs Hide. Now, please give me some backstory on this. And did I pronounce Sand Keg correctly?
Matthew: Yeah, so I started a company with a couple partners called Find Familiar Spirits, and what we do is we go out and build high-end sort of spirit experiences around fandoms. And so we launched back in October with a product called Quests and Quests and has had now three releases, Paladin, Paladin Plus One, and Rogue. All three of those releases went great. Basically what Quest End is a series of 16 different drops. Each drop is a different class in Dungeons and Dragons, and each drop is a continuation of an ongoing epic saga, right? So it’s a story wrapped up in a whiskey experience wrapped up in Nerd Nirvana. If you are, somebody once said, Todd Stash once said, the perfect Venn diagram or the Venn diagram of whiskey drinkers and DD players is a perfect circle. We launched that back in October. It went amazingly well.
We blew everyone’s doors off and expectations. We smashed all of our own expectations plus the industries. And so that was really fun and very exciting to be a part of a day in the day out growing a brand and trying to figure out how to build luxury goods for geek culture. And the next iteration was Critical Role, which if you don’t know Critical Role is the single biggest sort of DnD streaming show out there. Millions and millions of followers, and they do live shows at Wembley. They have an ongoing animation series. They’re incredible and they’re incredible people and they’re iconic in the community. We reached out and thought, Hey, maybe there’s a way to build an in world version of something they have in a Critical Role, and they were receptive to it. And our team found this thing called Sandkheg’s Hide, which is, it appeared in season one, episode 65.
And basically what it is, it’s bile from a sand cake, which is a giant sort of desert bug monster, which has gone through a process to be drinkable, and the minute you drink it, you immediately get drunk and your whole face goes numb. And so there’s a whole in-world aspect of Sandkheg Hide. So it is basically, we created exactly how Matt Mercer described it. We create the bottle. We basically, we took that episode and we showed it to our master blender woman named Ally Ochoa and Allie went out and interpreted that and she built this incredible whiskey that we’re really excited to bring the community starting the beginning of next month.
[Johna then asked Lillard about upcoming projects.]
Matthew: Actually, I have a movie coming up called Life of Chuck that Mike Flanagan directed, and then I’ve got Five Nights of Freddy’s 2 going into production, and then hopefully I get a TV show. No, no call yet. No call yet. I’ll let you know. No call.
Sandkheg’s Hide is available for order now on the Find Familiar Spirits website, which will ship out in between May 2nd and May 23rd.
For the FULL interview, check out Johna’s interview on our friends the Kinda Nerdy Girls YouTube channel:
A girl with too many fandoms to count.
