Don’t call it a comeback. Though actress-writer-entrepreneur-creative powerhouse Felicia Day has been less visible in the world of geek culture that she helped to create in recent years, she is still at the top of her game. The proof is Third Eye, her new fantasy-humor original podcast that debuted on Audible October 5, which she describes as her biggest passion project since her fan-favorite web video series The Guild from the early 2010s.
“Third Eye was supposed to be a television show,” said Day in a phone interview. “I came up with the idea in 2016 and pitched it to Hollywood. They did not decide to make my masterpiece and I was gutted.” Day says the rejection hit her pretty hard, leading to an extended period of creative block. “Cut to several years later. I just left my company, Geek and Sundry. I just had a baby. So I was a little bit up in the air.”
Day says she had the opportunity to pitch her story about a Chosen One who fails and has to redeem herself as an original podcast series for Audible. When COVID hit, it gave Day time to craft a 450 page script amounting to seven hours of story content.
She then recruited a who’s who of actors and fellow nerd-lebrities including Sean Astin (Lord of the Rings), Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation), London Hughes (The Netflix Afterparty), Danny Pudi (Community), Lily Pichu (Offline TV) Alan Tudyk (Resident Alien), Hudson Yang (Fresh Off the Boat) and Christopher Judge (God of War),with Easter Egg cameos by Weird Al Yankovic, Troy Baker and others. She even got best-selling author/producer Neil Gaiman (Sandman, Good Omens) to lend his unmistakable voice to the role of the show’s snarky narrator.
“It was intimidating to hear Neil read my words,” said Day. “It was a total swing-for-the-fences for me to ask him to do this. When he emailed back that he wasn’t just saying yes to a friend, but because he actually thought it was very good, I started crying. It was the biggest complement of my life.”
Third Eye certainly has the makings of a show with appeal to fans of Gaiman’s work in its mashup of mythology and modern sensibilities. In Third Eye, Day portrays Laurel, a wizard who lost in a conflict with her nemesis Tybus (Judge) a decade ago and is still dealing with having failed to live up to her “Chosen One” status. Her journey of redemption brings her into contact with a motley assortment of supernatural creatures including vampire Frank Fletcher (Astin), an exiled faerie princess (Hughes), and Tybus’s muscle, Robigus (Wheaton).
Day says the story was partly inspired by her own experiences as a child musical prodigy (she plays violin), partly by her experience of creative burnout, and by every nerdy introvert’s secret fear of wilting in the spotlight. “I love the idea of subverting tropes,” she said. “I did that with The Guild, subverting how people think about gamers. And here, I thought, ‘well what if the Chosen One turns out not to be a winner?’”
The experience of writing and producing Third Eye, including doing the voice sessions in studio with the cast to preserve the spontaneity and humor, and supervising the long and exacting post-production by San Francisco-based Mumble Media, seems to have restored Day’s sense of joy in creation. She says the sessions, directed by Joe Deray, were a lot of fun as the actors bounced lines and ideas off each other. “I don’t know if Audible does gag reels,” she said, “but there was a lot of material. Lily has quite a foul mouth for someone with such a cute little voice, and Wil Wheaton was so ‘effective’ in his romantic scenes with Sybil that I had to jump in to get him to dial down the pervy bits!”
All of this is welcome news to Day’s legion of fans who have been waiting a while for a new creative project. When she launched this stage of her career in the late aughts, capitalizing on notoriety from parts in fan favorite shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Eureka and Supernatural, there was neither the template nor the infrastructure for someone to build a career in entertainment outside the gatekept world of studios and networks. She pioneered and helped to define the roles we now call “influencer” and “content creator” by creating work directly for her audience and building her brand around the interests she genuinely shares with her fans.
“I’m always an advocate for people being excited to show their authentic selves,” she said. “As somebody who was marginalized for some of the things I liked, especially when I moved to Hollywood and said I was a gamer, I think a lot of the content that I’ve made is rebelling against being made to feel different or shamed or an outsider for the things I love.”
Day says she has mixed feelings about the way nerd culture has become the center of the entertainment universe. “The mainstreaming of geek content is exciting, but also not something that I revel in,” she said. “I just want people to enjoy themselves, and if they enjoy themselves through the media, they experience and celebrate and are a fan of, that’s wonderful. I don’t like seeing people exploited monetarily, and I don’t like seeing the content they make become a commodity for money’s sake versus like the spirit of loving other worlds and things like that. So you know, I have a very rocky road with Hollywood. I love acting and hosting. But writing my own stories on the side is where I find my joy because no one else can interfere with that vision.”
One big way that Day has kept her options open is by retaining creative ownership of her work. She says she hopes that some day, Third Eye will make its way into other media such as comics, games, or even that elusive TV or streaming deal. “I can imagine the characters going other places, whether that’s in another audio production or something in print or video. I will say I’m thankful that this did not get bought as a television show all those years ago because it never would have come to fruition with this kind of vision, assuming it even made it out of development.”
As a SAG member currently on strike, Day declined to discuss any existing or upcoming screen projects, except to say that “I took a big break from acting for several years based on leaving my company, having a child, having some personal issues I needed to deal with, but I’m very excited to dive back in and hopefully be part of a fan family again, because that’s what I love. I just love fandom. I love being part of the Sci-fi, fantasy, universe and I love acting.”
In the meantime, Day is at work on some graphic and prose novel projects upcoming in 2024 and 2025. Is a Guild reunion in the offing? Day said she’d love to do one someday, but did drop the bombshell that there is a Guild musical in active production in collaboration with “some amazing artists from New York who approached me about the property.”
Third Eye is streaming on Audible starting October 5, 2023.
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