Felicia Day

So they called up and asked me to co-host Attack of the Show on G4 a few weeks ago, and I said, “sure!” And then I started to think about what that entailed…and then I realized it was live….oh boy!

I say this a lot, but you never appreciate how hard something is until you try to do it yourself. Hosting, especially a live show, is officially in that bin for me now. I didn’t even realize all the moving parts that doing a show like this entails, or I might not have said I’d do it, haha! Not only are you reading from a teleprompter the whole time, but you have a thing in your ear for people to talk to you in, you have TONS of copy to try to deliver (hopefully believably), you have to stop talking when the video rolls, you have to adlib, but not TOO much to get off track in timing, AND you have to figure out what camera to look at when they change angles! WHILE YOU’RE TALKING! That was the part I was most nervous about, but a nice stage manager waves furiously at you to change your eyeline, so it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. But imagine changing eyeline WHILE you’re READING something, and picking up in the same sentence on a completely different reading surface. And making it seamless. ACK! New respect for all hosts out there!!!!

Thankfully my co-host Chris Hardwick (@nerdist on Twitter) was a gentle soul and VERY experienced and we genuinely had fun together. The producers and crew were totally cool, and the experience actually turned out to be fun. It was only the second time in my LIFE I’d read off a teleprompter (first time was E3 for the Xbox announcement), so I’m pretty happy with not having a HUGE freak-out moment. Dare I say I had a bit of fun? Ok, I will

Here’s the embedded intro clip from the show, and you can watch a few of the other videos on their website (including the Looong clip I did on Gadgets where I got very nervous about talking a lot by myself, haha. I did it perfect in the readthrough too, GRR! Such is live TV).

It’s a lofty title to the article, but this is one of the funnest interviews I’ve done, it has a lot of great things in it. The biggest thing that people have picked up on is this section:

Wired.com: Has The Guild helped your acting career?

Day: It’s very funny. No. It’s a little frustrating. Having done this for two years, I’ve gotten used to the fact that it’s not going to cross over. Occasionally I’ll see a writer who knows about the show. I have fewer auditions now than before I started The Guild because I have less time to concentrate on my acting career. In an ideal world, people would be offering me roles or at least I’d get more appointments and so would my cast members.

I certainly didn’t want to sound whiney about it, which I hope it doesn’t come off being. It is what it is. The acting jobs I get don’t come from casting directors, they come from writers and producers calling me in directly, which isn’t that often. Oh, well. I just know I’m really happy making stuff on the internet, and hopefully can get enough jobs in the TV/Movie world every year to make my health insurance!

Well, that was nerve-wracking but exciting, being on real Late Night TV with THE GUILD!! Thanks for all the support, and special thanks to Jimmy Fallon! He is truly a wonderful, kind person. Hamlet was AMAZING!

I wish my grandfather were still alive, he would have been so proud that I was in his favorite newspaper Nice article about how we’ve done and continue to do our show, with a great quote from the Internet’s Grande Alt-Dame, Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing:

“If you cruise through the top YouTube video categories such as comedy, all of the thumbnails [images from the video] have a hot girl with cleavage. What ends up most highly trafficked involves stupid women,” says Xeni Jardin, executive producer for Boing Boing Video. “She’s not pasted on as a figurehead by some online programming guy in a script that panders to Internet types.”