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Whitney Moore knows what makes a cult classic.

To be fair, she has more experience in the field than most people ever will. Her 2010 film Birdemic: Shock and Terror is one of the internet's favorite "so bad it's great" numbers, with yearly screenings, drinking games, and countless remixes being whipped up in its honor. But even beyond that, Moore is currently a fixed name in one of the most feverishly beloved cult-hits-to-mainstream-success stories in modern media: Critical Role Campaign 4. So you can imagine how excited we were about the possibility of chatting with her. 

Our discussion, though, went a lot deeper than just niche fanbases. From her time working with Dwayne Johnson and A24 to the NSFW origin of her demonic CR character Tyranny, we touched on a Hollywood career that's as impossible to encapsulate as Birdemic's own plot, and I'll be honest - I think I came out just a little bit wiser to the meaning of art than I was going into it. 

Sounds like something you'd be interested in being too? Read on for more.

Whitney Moore: Hey Grant, how’s it going? 

Popverse: Hi Whitney! It is going so well. How about yourself? 

I'm great. I'm having soup. 

At 10 AM?  

Yes, dude, I've been on a breakfast soup kick.  

Does that mean you've converted a kind of soup, like Italian Wedding, to breakfast time, or you've taken breakfast and souped it?

Great question. It's more of an egg drop soup. Basically, you can add an egg to anything and it becomes breakfast. But now I'm curious, what would a little maple syrup do to this, a little waffle? Do you just want to talk about this? 

I'm so fine to just talk about this for 25 minutes, but I'd get fired. It’s been 15 years since Birdemic: Shock and Terror came out. What are you doing to commemorate the occasion?

I had no idea it was 15 years, actually. I've actually been dying to put together a film festival called the ‘First Worst Film Fest,’ where so many of my friends have their first bad movie. I always stand by the fact that, like, everybody has their Birdemic, and for me, it was just right place, right time for it to get popular. But I’m planning, maybe in the next year, of getting a bunch of friends together to screen their own versions of it, with Birdemic as a sort of template, because I have a lot of friends who haven't seen it.

Fast-forwarding a decade and a half, you just finished work on a giant A24 movie. Was there any overlap between Birdemic and The Smashing Machine?

The Venn diagram between Birdemic and The Smashing Machine, I think, is at their core, they’re stories about overcoming the odds, okay? That’s the boring answer. No, I would say, a similarity is that a lot of it is making it up as you go. What that means, like, in terms of Birdemic, is that the man in charge did not know what he was doing. I think that's a fair thing to say. And in the Smashing Machine, you have a fantastically talented director and writer who are doing a story about someone who doesn't know what they're doing, and is making it up as they go. 

On a very real, tangible level - in Smashing Machine, a lot of my scenes were kind of improvised. We had a place where we were going that was so wonderful, and [the filmmakers] just sort of told us the shape of what we were doing. Also, Birdemic didn't have a third act. It was very much made up on the fly. So there are some similarities I can draw. And I'm pretty sure there's a bird somewhere in Smashing Machine. 

We’ll look for it. So Birdemic is a real cult film, which is something I know you have a true appreciation for. From your perspective, what does a modern cult film look like? 

By definition, a cult movie is a movie that did not do well commercially but has a community of people who really adore it. The first example I can think of that it's not super recent, but it is definitely contemporary. is Jennifer's Body. It's so gay, it's so fun, it's so still current. But I think in terms of, like, cult sensation, it's just that it developed a community of people who really understand how special it is. 

Even though Jennifer's Body is not a camp movie, and I think when people look at cult cinema, that can absolutely include camp cinema. Sometimes they're one in the same. Sometimes they are. But a lot of the time, there's quality movies out there that just did not get their flowers. And I feel like with, with, with like streaming with such accessibility for those movies, they're like really they're finding new audiences. TV shows I feel like are getting that treatment a lot, too.

In that kind of the same vein, what is the difference between a movie that is so bad, it's good, and then a movie that is just bad? 

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I’ve landed on this: I do not believe that art is good or bad. I believe it is inspired or uninspired. That's a core thing with Birdemic - you see the effort. And if you see the effort, you'll be on the side of the filmmakers. That helps me be a keener judge to movies that are coming out and deciding how I feel about them. Like, the movie can be so technically impressive, but just doesn't have the juice, just doesn't have heart. Or a movie can be really, really bad, but you're like, ‘Damn it, they really wanted to make a movie.’

That’s so well put. Well, speaking of being technically impressive, I wanted to ask you about your latest burlesque act, which is based on John Carpenter’s The Thing. How did that come about?

Burlesque is recent hobby of mine, and the main thing behind it is just, ‘Can you make it work?’ The Thing is one of my favorite movies, and I had a silly idea to be the husky [Author’s note - from the opening sequence; look it up] and then sort of transform into the monster that you see to the tune of I Wanna Be Your Dog, by The Stooges. That's something I really love about burlesque; it’s kind of like, the stupider, the better. If you have an idea and you really feel like you can sell it, it does not matter how dumb the idea is. 

It seems like there’s a lot of horror overlap in the burlesque and drag communities. Why do you think that is? 

Burlesque is inherently subversive. It takes women's bodies - that are categorically commodified and sexualized and put in a very small or small category - and flips it to something where you can take a femme body and make it scary, make it funny. Do basically everything but turn you on. And you still get to see boobs. I think that people who like that sort of subversion also are naturally drawn towards horror. 

Definitely. So switching gears a bit to Critical Role - what’s your history with TTRPGs before you got the call about being in Campaign 4?

I've begun a lot of the indie campaigns have fallen apart, as with with most adults. But I was on a show at Geek & Sundry back when Critical Role was also there called TBD RPG. We basically took independent tabletop games and did short-term campaigns with them. So every campaign would last three weeks, and we would alternate DMing or jamming, and that's sort of where I cut my teeth in the actual play space. It was so much fun. 

That said, like I mentioned, the longest campaign there was three weeks, so we didn't get to spend time with a lot of characters. Doing Critical Role is new for me, in a sense that I'm digging, getting to spend more time with the character before having to say goodbye. That's if Brennan doesn't kill me. 

Was there a particular game that really stood out to you from TBD RPG?

Yeah. I have to shout out the sort of impetus for the show, which was a game called Weave. I'm not sure if it's even around anymore, but it was such a cool idea. It was basically a tarot deck - I'm a huge tarot fan - and you would draw the cards and scan them into an app that would give you story points and pieces. It was a way for beginners who wanted to get into collaborative storytelling and to do it in a really fun, tangible way. You get the tactility of playing with these beautiful, artful tarot cards, but then you scan it and then you're like, oh, there's this NPC here, and it was so cool. We did that one for, I think, a year before we moved on. So, yeah, that was a really cool idea. If it's still around, I highly recommend. 

Do you read tarot? 

I do, and I love to do it. I raised some money, you know, when we were having the L.A. wildfires - it's so easy to feel helpless because there's nothing you can do. So I was just sitting in my house doing tarot readings for people to raise a little bit money. I love to do it. It just teaches you so much about yourself. 

I’ve got to shout out - I got a new deck this year called the Transparent Tarot that is so beautiful and really unique and interesting, because the cards are clear plastic with very minimal imagery on it, then you lay them on top of each other to create a new image. I learned on the Rider-Waite as most people do, because that's where all of the inspiration comes from. And I kind of got away from being intuitive about it, because I learned the meanings so concretely. So it's nice to have a more abstract deck where you feel your way around it a little bit more. 

I'm a big esoteric person. And to, you know, segue it back - that's something Brennan [Lee Mulligan, Critical Role’s Campaign 4 GM] and I have a really great time talking about. Demon symbology, and mythology, and Brennan has 100 million ideas always all the time. So it's been so fun to bring back that part of myself to this, to this work. 

On the subject of your Campaign 4 character, Tyranny, you have this in-story relationship with Sam Riegel’s character, Wicks. What has the process of working with him off screen to develop these characters been like?  

The beautiful nature of this type of storytelling is that, you don't know what any other character is going to do. [Riegel and I] had our characters and we kind of knew a bit about what each other was about, but everything that he has done has surprised me in the best ways. I've said this before, but I really thoughtI was going to be the one to troll him and force him to be the voice of reason. But no, he’s making Tyranny be a babysitter. And it's so funny. But I think I'll find some ways to get him back for that.

Tyranny is such a visually fascinating character, can you talk about designing her look? Did your interest in demonology come into that?

Oh, that's actually a very funny story. Okay, I knew that I wanted to be a pink demon. I did not know at the time that demons were not a playable race. I heard Laura say she wanted to be a fairy, and I was like, ‘I'm gonna be a demon.’ And then Brennan was like, ‘Oh, yeah, absolutely, we’ll make that up. And for anybody curious, it's a tiefling build.

But anyway, I was really, really positive that I wanted her to be a pink demon with white hair. I don't know how I got on that. And then one day, when we were doing the character, I was at home, and I looked down at my vibrator wand. And it is covered in Babs Tarr stickers, and one of them was a pink demon. And I was like, ‘Oh my god!’ I think that [Tarr] calls that her “succubus line?” And that was it. Babs Tarr is an incredible artist, she does a lot of work with Critical Role, and she has a succubus that she has illustrated, so I manifested her. 

Truly, that is the best TTRPG character origin story I have ever heard. OK, well before we wrap up, what are you working on these days, besides Campaign 4? 

Well, I started writing during the pandemic, because the acting of it all really had slowed down. And I discovered that, ‘Oh, everybody wants to make something with their friends.’ And actually, it is as easy as just deciding to do it, and it's been the most freeing part of my career so far. 

My most recent project is a film called See You Next Tuesday. It's about a horrible, horrible woman, me. I wrote it as a vehicle for my brilliant friend, Steve Zaragoza, who I used to work with at SourceFed Nerd. I just think that he's one of the funniest people in the world, and I wanted to write him something that he could act in.

We shot it in Long Beach over three days; we totally crowdfunded it. And it was just a blast.The thing that I'm really chewing on right now about it is just how soul-nourishing it is to be able to write for my friends and make things with my friends. Everyone in Hollywood is struggling right now [...] it's hard because you want to still be an artist, even though there's less work right now. That part of you that is creatively driven doesn't go away. 

So being the person that's like, ‘Okay, I'm going to I'm going to get online and ask for money and I'm going to write this stupid little script so that, you know, people can see the sad clown in you, and you and come together and you make it with your friends’… that’s just really the highlight of my year. 

I codirected it with my friend Marques Mallare, who codirected the Dave Heatwave music video that I directed starring, Matt Mercer’s brother. He also directed a short that I wrote called Downswings, and he's fantastically talented, and I'm so excited. It's just a weird, kind of horny, kind of sad movie, which is just exactly who I am. 

With two animated series on Prime Video, Campaign 4 in full swing, and so much more Exandrian lore to come, Critical Role is showing no signs of slowing down. That's why the adventuring party at Popverse are here to bring you everything we can from those nerdy-ass voice actors & Bo., including:

• Critical Role release schedule
• Critical Role's Campaign 4 characters ranked
• How to watch Critical Role in order
• Ways for you to relive the Critical Role panel from ECCC '26
• Taliesin Jaffe on playing Mollymauk Tealeaf for Campaign 2 vs. playing him for Prime Video
• Matt Mercer's homebrew warrior class (created originally for Vin Diesel)

...and much, much more. Roll initiative, player. Magic awaits.