dpAttention, crawlers: Seth MacFarlane’s live-action “Dungeon Crawler Carl” TV series has found its Queen Anne Chonk.
Jeff Hays, the narrator and producer behind all eight of the currently released “Dungeon Crawler Carl” books, has been cast as the voice of Princess Donut on the Peacock TV adaptation of Matt Dinniman‘s best-selling LitRPG novels.
For those who have yet to enter the crawl, Donut is a tiara-wearing talking cat who belonged to the titular Carl’s ex-girlfriend, Beatrice. When an alien attack pushes Carl and the remaining survivors of humanity underground into a televised competition for their freedom, Carl teams up with Donut as his partner in the deadly game show.
Hays is well known to fans as the voice of Donut — and every other “DCC” character — in the audiobook versions. His addition to the “Dungeon Crawler Carl” TV series, which was announced Thursday during the Penguin Random House’s “Spotlight on Matt Dinniman” panel at San Diego Comic-Con, marks the first casting news since the show was ordered to series at Peacock last month. (However, actor Seth Green has already publicly thrown his hat in the dungeon to join, too.)
The series will be led by Chris Yost as writer and showrunner. Yost will executive produce alongside MacFarlane, Erica Huggins, Rachel Hargreaves-Heald for Fuzzy Door. Dinniman is co-executive producer. The adaptation hails from Universal Global Television.
Here’s the official logline for the “Dungeon Crawler Carl” TV series: “An alien invasion has wiped out most of humanity and any survivors are forced to fight for their lives on a sadistic intergalactic game show. Sounds bad, right? Now try doing it with bare feet and a stuck-up, self-centered, tiara-wearing talking cat as your partner. Welcome to Dungeon Crawler World: Earth, where the apocalypse will be televised … and Coast Guard vet Carl finds himself stuck with his ex-girlfriend’s award-winning show cat, Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk, as they try to survive the end of the world, fighting monsters, aliens, an insane A.I. and even other survivors … all for the sake of good TV. Survival is optional. Entertainment is not.”
Dinniman’s “Dungeon Crawler Carl” series — which currently consists of eight books out of a total of 10 planned novels — has sold more than 14 million copies across all formats. On Audible, the Hays-narrated series has drawn more than 140 million listening hours.
Hays is repped by Matthew N. Sugarman at Weintraub Tobin.
