(Credits: Far Out / Frank Sun)
Sat 6 December 2025 9:30, UK
There are some actors that are so synonymous with an era that it’s almost impossible to imagine them ever ageing, and if you conjure up in your mind a Hollywood movie made between say, the years 1998 and 2002, and make it either a comedy or a slasher, then think of a face to go with it, the face will probably be that of Matthew Lillard.
In fact, you could probably take it further and say, “think of a kind of skater dude character and/or a frat boy egging people on to make bad decisions,” and again, it’s Lillard’s face that you’ll land on. From 1996’s Scream through to the Scooby Doo movies in the early 2000s, he was seemingly everywhere, either running away from a masked knifeman or guzzling Scooby snacks.
His list of turn-of-the-century appearances certainly back up the zeitgeist in which he operated; you’ll find She’s All That, Thirteen Ghosts and the cult hit SLC Punk! – the story of two geeks who decide to be punks and listlessly ponder the meaning of life. It’s very much a time capsule of the end of the millennium and the unanswered questions people in their late teens had about what might be to come. (Hint, it was a trap).
Lillard has worked consistently since what would be considered his peak, acting in well over 150 different productions, but not all of them were of Scream quality, and he’s the first to point that out. Speaking to AV Club, he said, “(2012 sports film) Home Run Showdown is one of the more terrible movies. It’s one of the ugliest, fattest children that I have, but it’s a movie where I got a phone call on a Thursday to go work on a Tuesday.”
One of those American family dramas that you find on a channel way down on your Sky menu while you’re hungover at 3pm on a Sunday, Home Run Showdown was a baseball film about two brothers running competing little league teams that didn’t get a cinema release and of which nobody on this side of the Atlantic would (rightly) have any memory of at all.
He added, “It’s a script that everyone knew was terrible. It was produced by a porn mogul, and we shot in Detroit, which offers its own intricacies of delightfulness. So it’s Dean Cain and I and a group of kids, an ugly, little, fat beast of a film that is stuck in the doldrums of Netflix somewhere deep, deep, deep, deep, deep. It’s a horrible kind of film.”
Sounds good! Quite aside from the fact that former Superman Dean Cain is by all accounts the worst type of person, nothing about that movie sounds in any way either intriguing or interesting, especially since baseball is a pastime that ranks up there with emptying the lint drawer from a tumble dryer or having to change the address on your driver’s license. On a Tuesday. With a migraine.
Whether it was Home Run Showdown that recently caused Quentin Tarantino to declare Lillard was one of the actors he can’t stand (along with, mystifyingly Paul Dano) we probably won’t know, but it probably deserves to be let’s be honest. Lillard, though, isn’t short of work, and is still making Scream movies 30 years on with the soon-to-be-released seventh instalment, plus not only does he pop up in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, which is out this week, he will also appear as Shaggy once more in a live-action Scooby Doo series.
It’s like the late ‘90s again! Oh, if only.
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