{"id":875817,"date":"2026-10-09T02:20:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T02:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/875817\/"},"modified":"2026-10-09T02:20:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T02:20:10","slug":"matthew-lillard-resented-scooby-doo-when-career-failed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/875817\/","title":{"rendered":"Matthew Lillard Resented Scooby-Doo When Career Failed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMatthew Lillard<\/a> got brutally honest about his love-hate relationship with the \u201cScooby-Doo\u201d movies while participating in Variety\u2018s \u201cKnow Their Lines\u201d video series. The actor expected to become a blockbuster movie star after landing the role of Shaggy in 2002\u2019s live-action \u201cScooby-Doo<\/a>,\u201d which earned $275 million worldwide. But the franchise was short-lived after 2004\u2019s \u201cScooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed\u201d disappointed and cut Lillard\u2019s blockbuster dreams short.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI felt a ton of pressure to not suck,\u201d Lillard told Variety\u2019s Nick Stango about landing the Shaggy role opposite Freddie Prinze Jr. (Fred), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Daphne) and Linda Cardellini (Velma). \u201cIt was the first big movie that I was in and it was a big opportunity for me. And then I felt that \u2018Scooby Doo\u2019 is this big movie, I\u2019m now going to go off and be a big movie star. And it was right about this time, after the second movie, that my career took a real nosedive for a long time. Like, I may be one of those guys from the \u201990s that never comes back. This movie is a love-hate relationship for me because I was like, \u2018It\u2019s \u201cScooby Doo\u2019s\u201d fault. That\u2019s why I\u2019m not working.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI resented \u2018Scooby-Doo\u2019 for a long time, but I never regretted doing it because the reality is that if I didn\u2019t have the money I made in the second film, I wouldn\u2019t have made it through,\u201d he continued. \u201cMy wife and I would have had to sell everything. We eventually [did sell a lot]. We sold our cars, we sold our house. We basically downsized our lives so that we could live in a very affordable way. And my wife went back to work, and that was a real pivotal moment for me as well. Like I felt like before this movie, \u2018I\u2019m doing all these movies and I\u2019m a big guy.\u2019 The reality was I\u2019m not. I was always a character actor, and I thought I was more than that. There was like a real humbling of Matthew Lillard that happens right after this movie that now I\u2019m so grateful for.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLillard earned the biggest payday of his career for starring in the \u201cScooby-Doo\u201d sequel. He told Business Insider<\/a> last year that he expected the sequel to be a huge success and catapult him into becoming No. 1 on the call sheet for the next decade of his career, but then the opposite the happened and he couldn\u2019t find any work as a leading man.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI was caught up in this drive to be quote-unquote famous,\u201d Lillard admitted, noting that he finally had to stop caring about chasing fame in order to build back up his career as a character actor.<\/p>\n

\n\tA change in thinking allowed Lillard to break through in ways he was not expecting. While he continued to voice Shaggy in various animated \u201cScooby-Doo\u201d films, he also won supporting roles in films like the Oscar-winning \u201cThe Descendants\u201d and Clint Eastwood\u2019s \u201cTrouble With the Curve.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWatch Lillard\u2019s full Variety video interview in the post below.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Matthew Lillard got brutally honest about his love-hate relationship with the \u201cScooby-Doo\u201d movies while participating in Variety\u2018s \u201cKnow…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":875818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88,97212,110243],"class_list":["post-875817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-matthew-lillard","tag-scooby-doo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=875817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/875818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=875817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=875817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=875817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}