Matthew Mercer

Matthew Christopher Miller was born in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. He is primarily of Scottish descent.^[4] His family moved to Los Angeles when he was eight years old.^[4] He attended Agoura High School in Agoura Hills, California.^[5] He has a brother who is a musician under the stage name Dave Heatwave. He spoke with a stutter when he was young, leading his father (who also stuttered) to recruit a speech therapist who managed to reduce the effects to the point that only certain words trigger it.^[4] He adopted "Mercer", which members of his family had used in the past, as his stage surname because his birth name was too similar to someone already represented by SAG-AFTRA.^[4] He had a stint as a member of The Groundlings.^[5]

Mercer's family advised him against moving into theatre as a career, and so he initially considered working in animation. He was dissuaded by advice from professional animators about the working conditions in that field however, and joined the games industry instead. In his early career he worked as a QA tester and later associate producer on a number of Edutainment titles developed by Sound Source Interactive and TDK Mediactive. After "friends of his father got him some odd jobs in voiceover", Mercer decided to pursue the profession, and resigned from his game development job.^[6][7]

Mercer began his voice acting career performing English walla and additional characters in several Japanese anime, and has since also worked in cartoons, video games, and radio commercials. He has been a guest at conventions around the world, hosting at events such as Anime Expo and Anime Matsuri. His work has expanded to a multitude of roles in cartoons, video games and radio commercials. He directed and produced the web series There Will Be Brawl,^[8] based on the Super Smash Bros. video game series, where he provided the voices for both Meta Knight and Kirby, and portrayed the role of Ganondorf. He also acted in several shows from the Geek & Sundry and Nerdist networks and produced the web series Fear News with the Last Girl for FEARnet which was a 2010 Webby Awards Honoree for the Experimental & Weird category.^[9]

In 2016, Mercer served as the Dungeon Master for Force Grey: Giant Hunters, which ran for 2 seasons.^[10] In 2017, he was the Dungeon Master for the Nerdist show CelebriD&D, which puts D&D-playing celebrities into a small, mini-campaign where they are paired with role-players.^[11] He has also been a player in other actual play web series such as Dimension 20 and L.A. by Night.^[12][13]

Mercer is the Dungeon Master of the web series Critical Role,^[14] which launched on Geek & Sundry in 2015, where he leads several other voice actors through a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.^[15][16] Critical Role was both the Webby Winner and the People's Voice Winner in the "Games (Video Series & Channels)" category at the 2019 Webby Awards;^[3] the show was also both a Finalist and the Audience Honor Winner in the "Games" category at the 2019 Shorty Awards.^[17] After becoming hugely successful, the Critical Role cast left the Geek & Sundry network in early 2019 and set up their own production company, Critical Role Productions;^{[18][19][20][21]} Mercer is the company's chief creative officer.^[3] Soon after, they aimed to raise $750,000 on Kickstarter to create an animated series of their first campaign, but ended up raising over $11 million.^[22] In November 2019, Amazon Prime Video announced that they had acquired the streaming rights to this animated series, now titled The Legend of Vox Machina;^[23][24] Mercer reprised his role as Sylas Briarwood and other characters.^[25][26]

Luke Winkie, in a human-interest story for Slate, called Mercer "an expert improviser" and "a maestro with the dice in his hands, weaving interlocking plot lines and complex thematic threads out of thin air" with "the innate ability to make a Dungeons & Dragons campaign feel like a tightly wound limited drama".^[27] Winkie commented that "it can be downright intimidating to watch Mercer when he's at the peak of his powers. As a career voice actor, he possesses all of the subtle performance intangibles that saturate his storytelling with life: the timing, the verve, the language flourishes".^[27] Academics Zac Boyd and Míša Hejná, in the journal Language in Society, highlighted that Mercer "introduced 1,144 unique NPC characters during" the second campaign of Critical Role.^[28] They analyzed nineteen characters based on exceeding a threshold of minimum voice time and plot relevance and determined through "holistic analysis of voice quality" of these characters that "breathiness" in Mercer's voice "emerged as signalling positive morality and stances of safety, comfort, and trust, where whisperiness signals negative morality and stances of threat. Qualitatively, pitch dynamism was also found to correlate with morality and stancetaking: the more limited the pitch dynamism, the more likely it is that the character portrayed is an Enemy and that they adopt stances of threat".^[28]

In October 2020, Mercer became the creative advisor for the Critical Role board and card game imprint called Darrington Press.^[29] From June to August 2021, Mercer appeared on Exandria Unlimited, a spinoff of Critical Role, as a player.^[30][31][32] In March 2022, he reprised his role in the two part special Exandria Unlimited: Kymal.^[33][34] In 2025, he was the game master for the Age of Umbra limited series.^[35][36]

Hayley McCullough, for the American Journalism, commented that "Mercer is well-known for his homebrew mechanics, character classes, and feats".^[37] Mercer's work as Dungeon Master has led to the development of three campaign setting books being published about his world of Exandria. The first is the Critical Role: Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting (2017) published through Green Ronin Publishing.^[1] The second is the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount (2020) published through Wizards of the Coast, thus making Exandria an official Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting.^[2][38] The third is Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn (2022), a revised and expanded edition of the Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, which was published by Darrington Press, the publishing label created by Critical Role Productions.^[39] Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn was nominated for the 2022 ENNIE Awards in the "Best Setting" category.^[40]

On March 15, 2022, a new adventure module titled Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep (2022), with Mercer, James Haeck and Chris Perkins as lead designers, was released. It is the second collaboration book between Wizards of the Coast and Critical Role Productions.^[41][42] Mercer was then a consultant on the Dungeon Master's Guide (2024) for the revised 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons.^[43] Mercer was a designer on Daggerheart (2025), a tabletop role-playing game system by Darrington Press, and created the "Age of Umbra" campaign frame for the system.^[44][45][36]

Mercer began dating voice actress and Critical Role co-star Marisha Ray in 2011, and they were engaged in 2016 before marrying on October 21, 2017.^[46] The video of his proposal became popular among fans as it involved an entire escape room game he secretly created with the Critical Role cast as a surprise for Ray.^[47] They live in Topanga, CA and have a pet corgi named Omar.^[48]

Mercer said in 2017 that, while he is heterosexual, he has also been attracted to men in the past and experienced homophobia while growing up as a boy who liked to experiment with an androgynous appearance.^[49] He explained that he tries his best in storytelling to also represent the experiences of close LGBT family and friends.^[49] As an activist, he works with various LGBT rights charities like OutRight Action International.^[50] In 2018, he revealed that he suffers from body dysmorphic disorder and has always struggled with his physical appearance.^[4]