Zoinks! Matthew Lillard is remembering the time he turned down the opportunity to join Dancing With the Stars because he thought it might keep him from getting an Oscar one day.
The Five Nights at Freddy’s star says he considered an offer to appear on the reality competition after his movie Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed bombed at the box office and acting opportunities had started to dry up.
“I was going to do Dancing with the Stars. And I was like, if I do Dancing with the Stars, I’ll never win an Academy Award,” Lillard told Business Insider in a new interview. “If I do Dancing With the Stars, I’ll be famous and not a great actor, and I really just wanted to be a great actor.”
In the end, the Scream star decided to part ways with his entire team to work with his first agent and get his career back on track. “I said, ‘I just want to be an actor. I just want to be in movies,'” he recalled. “‘I want to reset my expectations.'”
Lillard starred as the lovable Shaggy in the first live-action Scooby-Doo film alongside Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Neil Fanning, and Linda Cardellini in 2002. When a second film was greenlit — this time with an even bigger paycheck — he was certain that it would propel his career to new heights.
“I thought I’d be No. 1 on the call sheet for the next 10 years of movies,” Lillard said. “And the reality was, the exact opposite happened.”
Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed was critically panned when it was released in 2004, with Entertainment Weekly’s Scott Brown equating it to “being rushed through Six Flags by a parent intent on getting his money’s worth.” The film earned less than $200 million at the box office — a threshold that its predecessor easily passed — and a third installment was later scrapped.
“I was caught up in the success of what I was doing, I was caught up in the parts I was getting, I was caught up in this drive to be quote-unquote famous,” Lillard told Business Insider, noting that he would frequently read reviews and appear at movie theaters hoping to be spotted early on in his career.
Lillard first discussed restarting his career after being offered Dancing With the Stars in a 2017 interview with The Ringer.
“Long story short, along comes this offer where I can make a lot of money and people looked at me like, ‘You should do it.’ And I turned to my wife and I said, ‘We are living on ego,'” he said at the time. “It was like this come-to-Jesus moment, where I was like, ‘I’m not what I think I am, I’m not special, I’m not a star. I’m all these things that I’m not, and the more I sort of sell out, the less value I have in who I am.’ And my dream coming up was to be a great actor. [I thought,]’If I take Dancing With the Stars, I’m never coming back.'”
In the years after Monsters Unleashed was unleashed upon the world, Lillard continued to voice the character of Shaggy across multiple Scooby-Doo films, shows, and video games, including Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur; Big Top Scooby-Doo!; Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated; and Be Cool, Scooby-Doo!
He received praise last year for his performance as the evil William Afton in the Josh Hutcherson–led horror film Five Nights at Freddy’s, based on the popular video game series. A sequel is already in the works and set to serve up some harrowing haunts in December 2025.
“I’ve gone through good patches and bad patches,” Lillard told Business Insider. “I’ve been irrelevant and thought I was never going to work again. I’ve been at all aspects of the career, and I love where I’m at right this second.”