Dungeons and Dragons actual play Critical Role has introduced a small army of new core cast members in campaign four. Seated beside the hit series' founders and mainstays are new faces like Whitney Moore, the player behind bubblegum chaos demon Tyranny.
Compared with the Matt Mercers of the world, Moore may be relatively new to the longform actual play format - but her acting career has been just as colorful. In fact, Moore has one accolade that no one else at Critical Role's table can claim. She once starred in one of the worst films ever made.
If, like me, you spent too much time on the internet in the 2010s, you should be familiar with James Nguyen's infamous environmental thriller, Birdemic. If you haven't heard of it, it's difficult to describe just how terrible this movie actually is.
What the hell is Birdemic?
The audio quality will torture your ears from the very first line. You're forced to watch the hero's entire, unedited commute to work. Almost everyone seems to be method acting as a robot that's trying - badly - to convince us that they're human. There are awkward musical sections, even more awkward romance scenes, and more nonsensical dialogue than a sensible person can handle.
On your first watch, you might forget that Birdemic is a film about killer birds exacting revenge on humans for destroying the climate. That's because there are no birds in the film for the first 45 minutes. When they do appear, it's a hilariously jarring genre shift - that only gets more laughable when you see the special effects.
Birdemic's most iconic scene features Moore and her co-stars wildly swinging coat hangers at what appear to be JPEGs of eagles. Only their wings move. There is no music, just the repetitive screech of an eagle that was clearly a freebie stock sound.
Later come badly wielded guns, unprompted monologues about climate change, and a man in a cowboy hat that forces the stars to sell him some gas at gunpoint. Birdemic commits to being a disaster movie in all senses of the word, from its minuscule budget to the marketing stunt where the director drove around a film festival with the name of his movie on the side of a van - spelled wrong. If I had to sum up Birdemic in a single word, it would be 'excruciating'.
And I love it.
"No one's gonna see it anyways"
When it comes to Birdemic, Whitney Moore understands the assignment. I mention that I'm a fan of the movie, and her first response is to laugh. She's attended plenty of screenings that celebrate the schlock of her debut. She tells me she's even invented a brutal Birdemic drinking game.
"Something that I love about Birdemic fans is that they're not mean-spirited", she says. "It's really just about getting together with your buds and having a laugh."
As both a star and fan of 'trash horror', Moore has owned her role in the historic dud that was Birdemic. "I think the biggest lesson that I've learned with Birdemic is not to take yourself seriously", she says. "I was primed as a bad movie fan, but the big lesson was that your work is going to be perceived whether it - and you - are ready or not. It taught me to be a little less precious about people's reactions to me."
Birdemic is something for Moore and her friends - many of who she met because of the movie - to laugh about. However, it's not all been fun and games. While I might describe Birdemic as traumatic to watch, Moore remembers it as a movie that was traumatic to be a part of.
"We shot for seven months", she tells me. "I was freshly 18, and the experience was really not a good time for me." "It was really an awful experience, but I had in the back of my mind 'oh well, I'm getting practice - and no one's gonna see it anyways'." "I look back all the time, and I really hug my younger self, because she didn't know what was normal on a film set - and [Birdemic] was supremely abnormal."
"We didn't have permits. Nothing was done the way that it should be, and I was very much on my own." "It was horrifically scary, but it was formative", Moore tells me. "By the end of it, I felt like I was so much tougher." She adds that she learned a lot about emotional boundaries from the experience, saying that she learned "to speak up when you're being mistreated".
Tyranny the chaos gremlin
The kind of gigs that Moore is booking these days are more positive and professional. She speaks warmly of Brennan Lee Mulligan and the rest of the Critical Role crew (even if she's not sure that her character will survive). She heaps equal praise on the Critical Role community, which has welcomed her - and Tyranny - with open arms. "I'm so happy that people have been digging Tyranny", she tells me, "and I've really been feeling the warm Critter hug."
So far, campaign four has been pretty intense. Its core conflicts are extremely political, and it opens with a funeral for a character that every character has strong feelings about - whether they're positive or not. While most characters are grieving or brooding, Tyranny is a lively bull in a China shop.
Tyranny was certainly conceived as an agent of chaos. "Sam Riegel and I are a duo", Moore says, "and I made the mistake of thinking that I could out-troll him, so now we're in a race to the bottom to see who can be the voice of reason first".
That doesn't mean that Moore is avoiding more serious roleplay, though. Her early interactions with the allies of Thiazi Fang, the house of Halovar, and her own demon family show an immense internal struggle.
"Tyranny is guided by her relationships as someone who's pretty new to the plane that she's on", Moore says. "Wicander is the model for her, and even though she thinks he's kind of a nerd, he is rubbing off on her."
"I think that she didn't realize - or maybe didn't plan on - being as affected as she is by the world around her. That's something I also really relate to as a person. Her dynamics and her loyalties are shifting, and it's a very scary, very teenage sort of time."
"Something that I'm hoping to dig into more as the show goes on is that, the longer she spends out in the real world, the less she identifies with her demon group", she continues. "She has an agenda that's fundamentally built into who she is, and I think that she's going to have a lot of crises of spirit the more that she develops bonds with her adventuring party."
Lessons for my past self
Moore can see a lot of similarities between the Birdemic and Critical Role fandoms, and it's not just because she's been recognized for her B movie work since joining campaign four. "Even though Critical Role is on the good quality side of the media spectrum, it's the same sort of people", she explains, "people who like to get together and talk and watch - there's a real community there."
In terms of lessons she's learned from actual play, however, they couldn't be more different from those taught by Birdemic. "I think that actual play is one of the most valuable things that you can do if you are a writer or if you're an actor or anyone who is a storyteller, because it teaches you to be generous", Moore says. "It teaches you to pay attention in a way that I feel you don't really get from anything else, except for maybe improv."
With the grand debut of campaign 4, Critical Role has brought two disparate parts of Moore's life together. Fellow players like Sam Riegel, who will know Moore for her previous actual play work, are now discovering Birdemic (though he's apparently only watching it 10 minutes at a time). D&D fans like me are being reminded of a film they are nostalgic for, while Moore herself is asked once again to reflect on an experience that, while influential, was also difficult for her.
At the end of our interview, I asked Moore what she would say to the 18-year-old that starred in Birdemic, knowing what she knows now. It's an emotional question.
"I would tell her that she's in for a rough couple of years when she moves to LA", Moore tells me, "but she's going to find people who see every aspect of her strangeness, her tenderness, her goofiness, and her weirdness". "It will be embraced by people who are deeply important, and it will elevate her more than she could know at the time."
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