Felicia Day: “I don't tailor my projects to what Hollywood wants anymore”

Felicia Day wants you to know she’s a failure — and she’s never sounded more gleeful about it. “I was a prodigy, I was a violinist, I was an internet prodigy with The Guild — and then I felt like a failure,” she says, not even pretending to fluff it up. This is the battered wand that powers Third Eye, her new Audible series that’s basically what happens when the chosen one blows it all… at the beginning.

“There’s no audio foreplay. We’re straight there. It’s over,” she deadpans. That’s how you know this is her kind of hero quest: the epic battle is over before the kettle’s even whistled, and you’re left with a protagonist who’s stuck picking through the emotional debris for the next fifteen years.

Day calls Third Eye a “love letter to the genre” but don’t expect elves shining in moonlight — expect dwarves running sketchy cash-for-gold joints in the back alleys of San Francisco. “Who has gold?” she laughs. “I’d drive by these places and be like, how are they paying rent with gold in L.A.? Well, what if it’s dwarves?” It’s grim fantasy with a face full of farts, as she describes it: Monty Python, Douglas Adams, and “nobody’s functional.”

Her chosen spell language? Not Latin — “there’s another franchise for that, and we know who we’re talking about,” she says, eyes rolling all the way to Hogwarts. Instead, she’s summoning magic in Esperanto. “It’s a made-up universal language from the ’70s that no one really speaks, except weird Nordic hobbyists,” she grins. Don’t worry, you won’t need Babbel to follow along.

Third Eye was a TV series once, in her head. “The hype was a little much,” she says about the failed pitch. So it sat there, neon sign and all, until Audible bit. Five years, a pandemic, a sinus infection, and a cast stuffed with personal friends later — Wil Wheaton, Sean Astin, Weird Al — Day’s misfit hero finally stumbled into your headphones.

It’s not exactly glossy. “I don’t like the artifice,” she shrugs. “I want the real stuff. It’s grim fantasy. Everyone’s a failure. Even the vampire has no fangs. How do you live with yourself as a vampire with no fangs?”

There's also a recurring middle finger to the 2000s. She doesn’t take it back. “The hair was awful, the music was not great — except Death Cab,” she concedes. “But we also had Hollaback Girl. And Nickelback. Some things can’t be forgiven.”

The best part is she doesn’t care if Hollywood wants any of this now. “I can’t tailor my projects to what they want anymore,” she shrugs. “I want to write the story I want to write.” It’s the perfect accidental pep talk for any fan out there feeling stuck in their own failed epic. Or as Felicia Day puts it, “You just have to keep going, because you can.”

Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.