“You had the part for 10 minutes”: the heartbreaking missed opportunity that cost Matthew Lillard a decade of work
If every cloud has a silver lining, then for Matthew Lillard, his cloud was undoubtedly Quentin Tarantino slagging him off for no discernible reason late last year, and the silver lining is the fact that his career has been massively on the up ever since.
Along with Paul Dano, Tarantino took aim at Lillard despite the fact that the guy must be one of the least offensive Hollywood actors around, despite it being more than 20 years since he was at his peak of popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But it hasn’t done him any harm, although he’s humble enough to put the career resurgence down to just nostalgia.
Whether or not people had forgotten his name since the days of Scream and Scooby Doo is one thing, but Tarantino definitely reminded everyone of him, even if it was to say that he didn’t care for his acting. But Scream 7 this year was a big box office hit with Lillard reprising his role as Stu Macher alongside fellow original castmates Neve Campbell and David Arquette, and he says more people are now interested in hiring him than ever.
He was definitely out in the wilderness for a long, long time, however, basically just doing Scooby-Doo voiceovers and straight-to-streaming shockers like the sequel to She’s All That, called, er, He’s All That. But in recent years, he’s put in some decent turns in movies as acclaimed as the Tom Hiddleston-led Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck, plus both instalments of the video game horror Five Nights at Freddy’s.
But his comeback might have come even earlier had he landed a plum role on one of the more popular TV shows of recent years, namely The Walking Dead. Lillard was in line to play Negan in the series, the baseball bat-wielding leader of the Saviours in the post-apocalyptic zombie thriller, but the part eventually went to Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
Lillard spoke about how close he came to The Big Thing podcast, explaining that, “The creator of the show comes over, and he said, ‘You have no idea. You had the part for like 10 minutes’. At that point, I would’ve had another 10 years of work.” Just like that, he’d lost out on at least ten years of steady income.
Morgan began the role in 2016 and played Negan for some six seasons, plus he got his own spin-off, The Walking Dead: Dead City, but Lillard doesn’t bear any ill will to his rival actor, adding, “He’s super masculine, and I just would’ve been more wicked and funny. He was super badass and masculine. We would have had very different takes. That part goes on. He becomes a legend.”
Nevertheless, Lillard did land his own comic book role in five episodes of Marvel’s recent Daredevil: Born Again, and he has a lead role in the new TV reboot of the classic King movie Carrie, which will hit streaming later this year.
Helmed by Doctor Sleep and frequent King adaptor Mike Flanagan, who directed Lillard on The Life of Chuck, it will use the same source material as King’s debut novel from 1974, but stretch the story out over a miniseries. Lillard will also have a starring role in James Gunn’s sequel to 2025’s Superman reboot, due out late next year, called Man of Tomorrow, so he’s doing alright for himself without Negan.
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