Dungeon Crawler Carl Star Reveals Princess Donut’s Live-Action Transformation
Peacock’s move to turn the Dungeon Crawler Carl novels into a live-action show is a big swing, to say the least. For fans of Matt Dinniman‘s sci-fi fantasy LitRPG series, the bizarre world and sense of humor and horror of the series have always felt better suited for animation, where the colorful characters, imaginative video game and tabletop RPG mechanics, and sheer scale of the shifting dungeon floors could be captured in style. However, the streamer already has a talented team that has the author’s stamp of approval, including <em>Thor: Ragnarok</em> co-writer Christopher Yost and Shadow & Bone creator Eric Heisserer as co-showrunners, and Seth MacFarlane, whose live-action Ted has thrived at Peacock, producing. They also affirmed their commitment to making something tailored for the fans with the announcement that audiobook narrator Jeff Hays would be back to voice Princess Donut.
GC, BWR, NW Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk is just as important to DCC as Carl himself. Their journey through the World Dungeon at the center of the deadly intergalactic Dungeon Crawler World game show begins alongside one another, and they spend most of their time throughout the eight currently released books leading a party of crawlers together and learning more about the apocalyptic scenario they’ve been thrust into. Although she may be a vain and sometimes rude Persian show cat given the ability to speak, the stories reveal that she contains multitudes, being deeply protective of those close to her and forging a bond with Carl as they vow to survive together, all while she becomes an in-universe fan-favorite crawler and one of the dungeon’s most powerful inhabitants. Hays has plenty of experience showing her many sides, but for television, the approach necessarily has to change.
DCC‘s man of many voices sat down alongside Dinniman for an interview with Collider’s Maggie Lovitt at New York Comic Con, where he opened up about translating Donut to live-action. The natural challenge with bringing such a character to life is convincingly applying the many emotions Donut experiences to a realistic cat. For Hays, though, it’ll also be different because he’ll actually be on set with the rest of the cast rather than in a booth. He’s not planning on changing how the cat sounds, of course. “Well, I think changing it too much would be a mistake,” he asserted. However, the narrator is already thinking ahead about how to best embody and stay in Donut mode in a production where he isn’t constantly swapping between voices.
“Obviously, the reason they hired me is because everyone… all the listeners were saying they would do horrible things to them if they did not, right? So presumably, they want Donut to sound the same. But I think I obviously also need to take a slightly different approach, in the sense that I need to be more present, or Donut needs to be more present within me throughout the entire thing. I have to learn how to stay in character for longer.”
