Matthew Lillard Shares a Rare Look Into His Family World

Matthew Lillard didn't pursue acting with designs on being rich and famous.

"I found acting because it was the only thing I was ever good at," the Scream star told E! News' Francesca Amiker in an exclusive interview. "The only thing any adult ever said to me is like, 'Hey, you know, you should keep doing that.' So I didn't chase it to be successful. I chased because I had nothing else."

Now, after 30 years in Hollywood, Lillard feels his career is "coming around second base, headed for home."

He explained, "You just want to keep doing great work. I think that so many times, actors lose the plot, get disinterested, don't work a long time and fall out of the zeitgeist."

But, happily, "things are really great right now," he added. "It's a blessing to have work, to still be relevant, to grow into my age and have the opportunity to keep feeding my kids."

Lillard shares three children with wife Heather Helm and, should they choose to follow in their father's footsteps, the world of show business won't be a mystery.

"It's so horrible," the 54-year-old quipped of his babies growing up to be actors. "No, I love it."

Their eldest happened to have been born the day Scooby-Doo opened in theaters, on June 14, 2002, and the success vibes were strong.

"I was literally holding my newborn child, and the head of the studio called to [say] congratulations," Lillard recalled. "And I said, 'Yeah, she's beautiful. I can't believe it.' He's like, 'No, we just greenlit the second movie.'"

That infant is now graduating from USC's Roski School of Art and Design, Lillard noted, while his second child is an actor who's also in college. "The good news is, they're incredible," he said. "They are just an amazing artist. And for me to watch them grow in the space...I was a kid that didn't even go to school."

But, he continued, "the good thing for me is that my kids have seen ebbs and flows. They know the reality of the business. I never pushed anyone into it, but I certainly wouldn't deny the passion of my kids who are both artists."

His son, however, is an athlete who "gave zero effs" about acting, Lillard cracked. "He was like, 'I want nothing to do with that. Nothing about that is appealing to me.'"

Meanwhile, Helm has been with him throughout the majority of his "long and sort of arduous" career, so she's seen it all, too.

"I've been married 24 years in a crazy business," Lillard said, but "we never had a difficult time. We're good yin-yang. I am very carefree, like, I will jump off a cliff a million times. And my wife has the ability to balance that with a sense of diligence, and she's very prudent."

She has been "incredible to parent with and a real gift to partner," the actor continued. And cliff-jumping tendencies aside, "I'm pretty basic."

The Detroit native also has serious perspective at this stage of the game, and he's glad that more people seem to know now—as opposed to when he got started in 1990, earning his SAG card from his no-lines screen debut in Ghoulies Go to College—that "every artistic journey is an up and down."

And his has been no exception. "There was a long stretch of my career that I didn't know if I'd ever work again," Lillard said. "That brutal realization, as you grow into your wisdom about your trajectory, that perspective is deeply important. There's an artist out there where who's struggling. My whole thing is, find fellowship, go back to class, do the things you love and, in time, success will come. Or, you'll find something else to be successful at."

Lillard ended up doing both, taking time last year to launch Find Familiar Spirits with screenwriter Justin Ware.

"We became uninterested in waiting for people to give us work," Lillard said, "and that's one of the reasons we started this company. Just sitting around waiting is a horrible way to live a life and the brutal part of being an artist."

After their Dungeons & Dragons-themed Quest End Whiskey was a hit, they opted to lean into Lillard's horror roots with their new tequila, Macabre Spirits.

"Same with the horror community, Macabre Spirits is built around this idea of seeing a community, recognizing their passions and then delivering something to those passions," Lillard explained. And they've created a whole "unboxing experience," he added, packaging their premium tequila with an "incredibly terrifying" novella written by Doctor Sleep director Mike Flanagan (who recently directed Lillard in another Stephen King adaptation, The Life of Chuck, which is due out in 2025).

But after celebrating the launch of their second flagship bottle, Lillard was headed right back to work on the sequel to the surprise 2023 blockbuster Five Nights at Freddy's.

From stealing every scene as the charmingly psychotic Stu in Scream, to "acting to a tennis ball" as Shaggy in Scooby-Doo ("you have no idea where they were gonna put the dog"), to playing "the Voldemort of the universe" in Five Nights, Lillard reflected, "I've picked up an iconic film along the way in each decade."

And sure there have been some if-only parts, he acknowledged, recalling a fruitless audition for James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy and the time he almost played Negan in The Walking Dead before Jeffrey Dean Morgan said yes.

And "to be Han Solo would have been huge," Lillard added. "I'm still available. If anyone's out there, I'm ready."

But in this galaxy, Five Nights—which made almost $300 million last year—has been "the ultimate gift," he said, and that's "probably going to be the most popular franchise I've ever been a part of, in terms of box office success."

So, that's not a bad place to be in for the homestretch.

"I've been very lucky over the course of my career to have really cool roles, big and small," Lillard said. "And I think my superpower is, I don't really care about what I missed. I'm really excited about what's coming."

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