Matthew Lillard Blends High Fantasy and Whiskey With Quest’s End

Matthew Lillard’s latest foray into high-end gaming accessories is off to another hot start. Earlier this year, Lillard was announced as one of the minds behind Find Familiar Spirits, a new spirits company releasing botique and limited edition products geared towards gamers. The first release of Find Familiar Spirits was Quest’s End, a line of whiskeys inspired by a fantasy story that hearkens back to the kinds told around Dungeons & Dragons tables across the world. To understand the idea behind Quest’s End and why Lillard has launched another business (Lillard is also one of the minds behind the successful Beadle and Grimm’s, a manufacturer of high end gaming boxes), we sat down with Lillard via video interview earlier this week. 

ComicBook.com: Could you walk us through Quest’s End – what it is, what it’s themed around, and so on?

Matthew Lillard: So Quest’s End is a whiskey brand and each bottle delivers a different chapter of a story that’s ongoing through all the drops that we have planned for this line of whiskey. The first four are Paladin, Rogue, Warlock, and Dragon. Each one of these comes with a 16-page booklet written by Kate Welch and art done by Tyler Jacobson, who’s a modern master of fantasy art, and each bottle has a different flavor profile that’s built towards the character. So it’s serialized like a comic book, or a serialized graphic novel, that it just accompanies this whiskey experience, that’s built for what you’re experiencing in the story. It’s super cool.

When you see tie-ins or unconventional products that tie into geek media like this, very often it’s like, “Oh, this is a weird license thing.” But you actually brought in some real powerhouses within the community, Kate Welch and Tyler Jacobson. How did you get them involved with this and what are they doing?

Lillard: They’re epic in the space and who they are as people, and listen, I’ve gotten to know them both over my time with Beadle & Grimm’s. I adore Kate. I love working with Kate. I love being at her table. 

Look, I see things all the time. You see people manipulating IP to sell more things, and it’s not what we are. That’s not what we want to do. We have to authentically build for the space and build for the community. So, going to Tyler and Kate made sense. First of all, they’re both top of their game. Second of all, I know them well and I know they have value in the space. I know that they are as invested in this community as I am.

How we got them was like, “You guys, here’s this idea. Do you want to come play?” They were like, “Yes. Who doesn’t want to?” I mean, look, Kate is telling a story, right now, Quest’s End is scheduled to run 16 drops. So Kate gets to tell a story, she’s leading this journey through 16 different drops. Tyler was like, “Dude, yes.” I mean, listen, Tyler works all the time for Wizards, for Magic, for all these huge entities.

Our whole thing is like, look, Justin [Ware, co-founder of Find Familiar Spirits] and I are both creatives. We want to empower your creative autonomy and be like, “We’re going to follow your lead. We’re giving you freedom within this form.” I think that, look, we’re all excited about doing something different. So we went to Tyler, I’m like, “Hey, we need a bottle.” So Tyler came up with the shield emblem and each bottle has a different shield. Tyler designed the map on the bottle, and the logo too. 

When we started, we all sat around like, “Okay, what would be cool? How can that progress over 16 drops, and how do we want to build this?” When you’re speaking to a creative and saying, “Hey, you’re empowered to do something different, and this is exciting and new, and you’re going to participate in a real way in success,” that’s all we want.

When it comes to matching the different story beats with the whiskey profiles, which comes first? The whiskey profiles or the story beats?

Lillard: Story always comes first.

So how do you match these? So when Kate’s like, “Okay, so we have this Paladin,” then how do you go and find the right taste of whiskey to taste to what you’re trying to convey there? 

Lillard: I love the question because it allows me to go on about Ale Ochoa. When we started this company, Justin and I and Tim [Sparapani, the third co-founder of Find Familiar Spirits] were all basically saying out loud to everyone that would listen, “Look, we need a director of spirit, we need a master blender who’s a woman.” And eventually, the universe connected the two of us. Ale Ochoa, she’s a rising star in the spirit industry. She’s worked all over, she’s won several gold medals, and we brought her on board  In launching a company, we don’t have a lot to offer, but we told her the same thing we did with Kate and Tyler. We said, “Look, in success, you’ll grow this company. In success, you’ll be able to do things that because we’re so small and so nimble, you’ll be able to do a lot of different things.” We consider ourselves like a movie studio. Movie studios have all different kinds of franchises. Some of them are big hits, some of them are little indies. But we said to Ale, you get to build all of them in all different kinds of spirits, so that’s exciting to her.

So one of the things we did, she doesn’t game. So we laid out who our lead character is, our lead character is Sarin of the Pit, she’s a Paladin, we find her in the fighting pits and she’s vanquishing a combatant and hopefully, she’ll win her freedom, and that’s where the journey begins. So what we did is we were like, “Here’s what a Paladin is, holy knights, deep purpose. Here’s who Sarin is.” And then she went out into the whiskey community, and gathered all these samples of whiskeys that were available to purchase, and she blended them in such a way that told the story, what she believes tells the story of the character. 

In fact, the interesting thing is that when we were doing all this purchasing, we were purchasing Rogue as well, that’s our next drop. So, we were collecting all of that whiskey.

So at some point, I was like, “We can always just switch the bourbons. We could switch Rogue into Paladin and just call that Paladin.” She was like, “No, you can’t do that. You can’t change it. It’s built for each one of these characters.” So, she’s been amazing. We were blending all last week. 

The notes for Paladin are “Notes of vanilla and fruit, in keeping with the noble aims of a Paladin, with an undercurrent of spice to reflect her fighting spirit.” Yeah, so it’s got a little heat on it, it’s got a little action on it, but at the end of the day, it’s a really buttery, beautiful whiskey, and we can’t wait for the world to check it out.

So I have to ask you, because you’ve done Beadle & Grimm’s, which has become a success, why have you focused on the gaming space? What’s the balance here between respecting the space, but also you’re building up these businesses?

I reflect on myself very rarely. So, you very rarely stop in this industry. Every time you stop and celebrate how far you’ve come in acting, you fall down 10 rungs. My whole thing is work harder than everyone around you, and you’ll find success. That’s always been my edict for acting. Outwork everyone.

For Beadle & Grimm’s, we were five guys who played together since we were 21 years old. We’re all over 50 now. We started five years ago, and we were having a midlife crisis. We were having this moment of like, “Well, what else is there?” I mean, all of us had successful careers, but we were longing for something else. So, we came up with this idea and listen, we were pushing around like, “Oh, an escape room. What if we started a mystery box company?” 

It was Bill [Rehor] that came up with this idea, “Pearl Jam has a boxed edition for the ultimate fan. We will be the boxed edition for Dungeon & Dragons,” and that was the whole pitch of the company. And we operated a business for four of the five years from 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM or 1 AM in the morning, depending on what we were on schedule for. Everyone worked our days, and then we worked at night together.

So now, all four of my partners at Beadle & Grimm’s have left their careers and we are expanding so rapidly, it’s crazy. I think that what happened is I saw the power in that. I saw the idea of having an idea and putting energy and time into it, and outworking failure. Working harder than failure can catch you, and it empowered me to think outside the box, and then the great thing about Beadle & Grimm’s is that we built something that we love, period, the end. So anytime we’re putting work into that, you’re like, “Oh, this is awesome. I know it’s awesome because I love this shit.” 

So for me, this idea made sense business-wise, and when Justin pitched it to me, I’m like, “Yeah, that sounds great.” Beadle & Grimm’s is running full-time, and that’s those guys’ job, and obviously, I work with them all the time, but that’s in good hands.

It’s empowering. I’ve spent my whole life waiting for somebody else to say to me, “Hey, it’s okay for you to work. Hey, it’s okay for you to feed your family.” Waiting for Hollywood to think that you’re cool enough for the job sucks. It’s a shitty way to live a life, so the idea of being able to control my own destiny by putting work into something I own has been awesome.

So what has the response been like with Quest’s End and what are your expectations?

Lillard: Look, when we launched, I know I’m not George Clooney. I am not Ryan Reynolds. I’m not a major motion picture star. So I knew that the company couldn’t be built on my name and reputation alone. I mean, if I tweet something about Scream, I’ll get a gazillion likes or whatever, and if I tweet something about Beadle & Grimm’s, I’ll get like 14 likes.  

People who follow me follow me because I’m an actor, not because I’m a gamer. So I knew we couldn’t build it on my social media following or my celebrity, and it was never the point. The point is to build it on community, build community first and worry about success later. 

We launched our first “Hey, this is what we’re doing” just about two weeks ago. We have 40,000 people on a waiting list for 5,000 bottles. I’ve never showed anyone this, but the neck wrap on the back, each bottle is individually labeled. So, each bottle is individually numbered. So it speaks to collectors, it’s speaking to the whiskey collector. Todd Stashwick has a great quote, is that the Venn diagram between whiskey drinkers and Dungeons & Dragons players is a perfect circle. Look, I think that the community responded in a really great way, and we immediately doubled our order for Rogue.

I mean, the last thing we want to do is build scarcity, but we started out simply and we’re growing quickly, and it goes on sale. So you can go to questsendwhiskey.com. You get early access on the early access waiting list, which is all you have to do is sign up, and you get two days early before the general population comes in, but that list has 40,000 names on it, and it’s shy of 40,000. But with this, most of our national publicity is coming up this week. We just did something in USA Today. We just did something for CNN. So yeah, it’s been huge. It’s been mind-blowingly big, and we couldn’t be more excited.