'Walking Dead' Actor Khary Payton to Guest Star on 'Critical Role'

Khary Payton will be fighting something other than zombies this coming Thursday.

Payton will be making a guest appearance on the upcoming episode of Critical Role, a popular web series featuring voice actors playing Dungeons & Dragons. The show airs on Geek and Sundry's Twitch channel and Alpha on Thursday evenings, and then are posted to YouTube the following Monday.

While Payton is perhaps best known for playing King Ezekiel on AMC's The Walking Dead, he is also a prolific voice actor. Payton voices Cyborg on Teen Titans and Teen Titans GO! and has also voiced characters in Young Justice, Big Hero 6, Batman: Arkham Knight, and Injustice II. That's probably his connection to the Critical Role cast, all of whom are professional voice actors themselves.

Payton comes on Critical Role at a crucial point in the show's new campaign, which is only a few weeks old. The new campaign takes place on the continent of Wildemount and features a small group of adventurers that includes a human wizard, a goblin rogue, and two tieflings.

In the most recent episode, the group was hired to find a nearby gnoll pack that had attacked the town of Alfield, burned several of its buildings, and made off with several villagers. The gnolls were discovered in a nearby mine, feasting on the hearts of the villagers in what appeared to be a ritual of some kind. While the group exhausted many of their spells fighting the first wave of the gnolls, they were drawn deeper into the mines after hearing a woman calling for help for her child.

Payton isn't the first big celebrity to guest star on Critical Role. Previous guest stars include Felicia Day, Wil Wheaton, True Blood and Justice League actor Joe Manganiello, fantasy writer Patrick Rothfuss and Talking Dead host Chris Hardwick. Mollymauk, a Critical Role character played by Taliesin Jaffe, is also a Blood Hunter, a class originally conceived for Vin Diesel during a one-off D&D session run by Critical Role Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer.

Critical Role airs on Thursday evenings at 7 PM PT on Twitch and Alpha.