Matthew Mercer

Life

Matthew Mercer was born Matthew Christopher Miller in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was eight. His father was a musician and audio engineer, his mother an actress and writer. As a boy he had a stutter; his father, who also stuttered, found him a speech therapist, and Mercer has said that practicing voices, theater, and singing helped him master it. He took "Mercer," a name his family had used before, as a stage surname because his birth name was too close to that of another union member.

His family steered him away from theater, and he started out in the games industry instead, as a QA tester and then associate producer on educational titles. When friends of his father found him odd jobs in voice-over, he quit to pursue acting, beginning in the early 2000s with crowd voices and minor roles in English dubs of anime.

Work

Mercer became one of the busiest voice actors of his generation. His anime roles include Levi Ackerman in Attack on Titan, Jotaro Kujo in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and Trafalgar Law in One Piece; in games he has played Leon S. Kennedy in Resident Evil 6, Cole Cassidy in Overwatch, Ganondorf in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Minsc, the hamster-toting ranger first seen in Baldur's Gate, in Baldur's Gate 3.

His other career began at a kitchen table. In 2012 Mercer ran a one-off, simplified fourth-edition Dungeons & Dragons game for Liam O'Brien's birthday; the group of fellow voice actors kept playing, switching to Pathfinder rules, and converted to fifth-edition D&D for the stream. Felicia Day's Geek & Sundry network invited them to stream it, and on March 12, 2015, Critical Role went live. Mercer insisted the show stay a real tabletop game rather than switching to a video game for combat. The first campaign, following the adventuring party Vox Machina, ran 115 episodes to October 2017; the second, The Mighty Nein, ran 141 episodes from January 2018 to June 2021; a third began in October 2021. As the Game Master, Mercer voiced hundreds of characters with distinct accents, rhythms, and personalities. He also built the world of Exandria from Homebrew material, filling it with custom classes, rules, and a detailed pantheon and history.

The cast founded Critical Role Productions, with Mercer as chief creative officer, and completed their move to their own channels in February 2019. In March 2019 they launched a Kickstarter asking $750,000 for a 22-minute animated special; when it closed on April 19 it had raised about $11.3 million, then one of the most-funded projects in the platform's history and a landmark of tabletop crowdfunding. Amazon picked up the result as a series, The Legend of Vox Machina (2022–), in which Mercer reprises villains and other roles from the campaign.

Exandria also crossed into print. Mercer wrote the Critical Role: Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting (Green Ronin, 2017) and was lead writer of Explorer's Guide to Wildemount (2020), published by Wizards of the Coast as an official setting for fifth-edition D&D. He led Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep (2022), designed Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn (2022) for the company's own Darrington Press, consulted on the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, and worked on Darrington's own RPG, Daggerheart (2025). He has also served as Dungeon Master for official Wizards of the Coast streams such as Force Grey: Giant Hunters. In 2025 he stepped back from the head of the table: Brennan Lee Mulligan became game master for the fourth campaign, which premiered October 2, 2025, with Mercer as a player.

Legacy

Mercer is the face of the Actual-Play Boom. Commentators have credited Critical Role, arriving just after the 2014 launch of fifth edition, with introducing a new audience to D&D and helping fuel its renaissance. Many players first learned what a campaign could feel like by watching him, and the "Matt Mercer effect" has become shorthand among game masters for the pressure of living up to a professional performer's theatrical standard.

His career completes a circuit that runs through this museum. The pen-and-paper game that began in Blackmoor and Lake Geneva basements became, in his hands, a broadcast performance watched by millions; that performance produced official D&D books, novels, comics, and animated television; and his voice work links the table back to the digital lineage, as a character from BioWare's Baldur's Gate returns in Larian's sequel. In Actual Play, the game master is no longer only a referee but a storyteller, actor, and showrunner, and Mercer defined that role for the New Golden Age.