Matthew Lillard

Scream put him on the map in 1996 as Stu Macher, the killer who treated the whole thing like a house party gone sideways. He parlayed that into SLC Punk!, which opened Sundance in 1999 and drew a casting call that included Jared Leto, Vin Diesel, and Heath Ledger. He got the part. Roger Ebert gave it three stars largely on the strength of his performance. For a brief window, he was a legitimate indie leading man. Scooby-Doo ended that. He's said he used to hate playing Shaggy because it wrecked his credibility with the filmmakers he wanted to work with. The indie doors closed, and the cartoon ones wouldn't stop opening.

The Scooby-Doo films cost him his indie credibility and replaced it with a cartoon dog. David Lynch cast him in Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017, which reminded Hollywood he could do more than pratfalls. Five Nights at Freddy's grossed $297 million on a $20 million budget, and suddenly he had a three-picture deal with Universal and Blumhouse. The sequel opened to $63 million. Blumhouse doesn't write three-picture deals for happy accidents. Scream 7 brought him back as Stu Macher, 30 years after the original. The Hollywood Reporter called it his "Renaissance era." The guy Hollywood typecast as a stoner sidekick turned out to be much better at playing the psychopath.

He started playing Dungeons & Dragons in 1978, when he was eight. He hasn't stopped. In 2018, he and four friends who've been running the same campaign for over 30 years co-founded Beadle & Grimm's, a tabletop company selling premium D&D box sets up to $500. All four of his partners quit their day jobs. He spun off Quest's End, a fantasy-themed whiskey at $150 a bottle that sells out every release. The nerd-to-luxury pipeline is real, and his came out of 40 years of actual play, not a trend cycle. He calls himself a "boring suburban dad," which is either modesty or the best cover story in Hollywood.