Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! brought a new group of heroes together in episode 3 for their doomed battle against another powerful villain. The cast of this episode includes Deborah Ann Woll, Anjali Bhimani, Abe Benerubi, and series co-creator Matthew Lillard as a player, with Bill Rehor once again hosting and his brother Charlie Rehor as the Dungeon Master. In the series, the cast plays first-level characters who face off against an unimaginably powerful monster, leading to a bloody end for the heroes each time.
Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! balances hilariously ridiculous antics from the players with a surprising amount of heart with an examination of what it means to be a hero when faced with impossible odds. The series was created by Beadle & Grimm’s founders Lillard, the Rehor brothers, Jon Ciccolini, and Paul Shapiro. Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! is one of the original series created by Wizards of the Coast and eOne as part of the new Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures FAST channel, available on Amazon Freevee, and Plex.
Screen Rant interviewed Anjali Bhimani about Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! She discussed playing with Lillard and Woll as well as the chaotic format of the series. Bhimani also explained what she took away from this experience, the surprisingly emotional elements, and how the format impacted the decisions she made.
Anjali Bhimani Talks Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!
Screen Rant: I’m very excited to talk to you about Faster, Purple Worm because your episode is so much fun.
Anjali Bhimani: It’s ridiculous. The whole thing, though, is. I am so grateful that the madness of Matt Lillard, and Bill, and the whole gang over there, I’m so grateful that they came up with this idea, because it is so much fun. It’s so much fun. I don’t think anyone needs to actually play D&D to enjoy it.
What were your first thoughts when you heard this concept of level one characters fighting the big boss monsters?
Anjali Bhimani: I loved it so much, because I tend to play, when I play… I feel a certain amount of pressure when I play, self-imposed, obviously, because no one else has put pressure on me, but I feel a certain amount of self-imposed pressure to not win the game, but you want to let things out slowly, and tell this story right. There’s this thing, special thing that you’re weaving with everybody else.
This time, it was just, “Okay, cool. This is just going to be pure madness. We can all be chaos agents.” I also have very rarely, I don’t know that I’ve ever… I take that back. In one charity, one-shot, I’ve played a chaos agent. Then in one, oh, a branded one-shot with Critical Role, but I normally play these very level-headed, knows what’s going on, kind of has their shit together.
People, oh, I hope I can curse on here. Sorry. Can I curse on here? All right, dope. I’m going to curse a lot. I normally play people who have their shit together, and this one freed us from any requirements in that department.
I love that everyone immediately was like, “Oh, chaos goblin time, let’s go.” It’s my favorite kind of character.
Anjali Bhimani: Yeah, and also just the different games they put into the game are so brilliant, the different ways that they challenged us in unexpected ways. So, so much fun.
Can you talk to me a little bit about your character creation process, and working with Deborah Ann Wall to create this relationship between your characters that had been established before the game?
Anjali Bhimani: I don’t remember how long in advance we had done this. I know it was very close to shooting, like maybe day of, but we had decided, “Oh, cool, cool, cool,” that we’re going to have, “We can know each other this way.”
I remember being in the green room, and just meeting people as people were coming in and as people were leaving from the show before, and I’m pretty sure that’s where we came up with it was in the green room right before the show. It worked out perfectly, because of her… Okay, cool. Her idea of a cleric-al character that worked out quite well.
It was fantastic. You have to tell me what inspired the voice. Your voice in this immediately got me.
Anjali Bhimani: I just love making ridiculous, high-pitched voices, and I don’t get to do it very often, so I love talking like this. It’s just really fun. I realized that in the show, I don’t think I actually speak, I speak before that moment, so I’m like, “Oh, crap. Anyone who doesn’t know me is going to think that’s my actual voice.” I talk like that for a really long time in that episode, so hopefully it didn’t drive people too nuts. Yeah, I just love silly voices. I don’t get to use them nearly as much as I want to. Especially since she was a gnome, it just seemed to make good sense. Since I knew that Franklin was going to be a little bit slower, it made more sense to be a little bit faster.
It was the perfect dichotomy between you two, of this very ridiculous voice that’s very deep and slow, and then we get that immediately. I’m like, “These two being best friends make sense. This is perfect.”
Anjali Bhimani: Also, Debra Ann is such a joy. We met three years ago, two, three years ago, in London at a convention. I had known her, that was the first time we met in person. I had actually met her years ago when we did a one shot of the Walking Dead RPG with Kari and Erika Ishii, and she’s just such a joy, and she’s so… If you watch her in this episode, she’s smiling the absolute whole time. Even when she’s thinking she’s just got this beautiful smile on. She’s such a joy to pair up with and to play with. So are the guys, I just hadn’t played with them before, but Matt and Abe, hats off to the brothers. Hats off to the brothers and their brilliance.
Yeah. I actually want to talk to you about playing with Matt, because this is the first time we see in the show, Matt as a player. What was it like kind of getting that experience, since he’s one of the creators of the show?
Anjali Bhimani: I knew it was going to be off the charts fun, because he’s Matt. Yeah, it was actually kind of nice knowing that someone who understood the format was within the foursome of us, because obviously, this was our first time experiencing the way that the show was going to be, and so knowing that if we needed to, he might help us set the tone going forward, as we went through with it. I was just excited. I was just excited to play with him, because I hadn’t had the chance to. Now I just want to play a lot with him. It’s super, super fun.
It was so much fun to watch. Then I’m curious, did you approach playing differently, knowing that one, this is only going to be an hour, and two, that your character is doomed?
Anjali Bhimani: Absolutely. There was much more, throw all caution to the wind. There was much more of a sense of… Normally, when you’re playing a long campaign, or even a limited campaign, but you know there’s going to be several episodes, you attempt to make your character good at what they do, but at some point or another, in some world, there have to be bad adventurers. There have to be people who are like, “Yeah, we’re going to go on an adventuring party,” and then they don’t come back. There have to be characters like that.
In my mind, it was definitely like, “Oh, so these are the guys that don’t make it. Great. Cool, cool, cool.” I’m just going to play someone who does not know, not doesn’t know what they’re doing, but thinks they know what they’re doing, and ultimately is just, makes bad choices. Make good choices until, oops, we met the monster of our nightmares.
What did you think when your character was falling, and it seemed like gravity might be the monster that took out your party?
Anjali Bhimani: I immediately went into triage phase. I knew they weren’t going to kill us off that quickly. I knew that we had to do a full episode, so that we had to come up with a thing. Thankfully, since I had Meichant, I knew that there was something I could do with it, I just couldn’t figure out what. I’m not small enough that the Meichant could lift me.
It was more like, “Oh, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.” It was more like the hamster wheel was turning in my head, the hamster wheel. There’s a hamster that runs my brain, apparently, but it was more like I was going through the Rolodex or going through the files and being like, “What can I do? What can I do? Do? What can I do?” Yeah. I feel like I’m going to be saying the same thing. It was just so much fun, just so much ridiculous fun.
I don’t know that I’ve ever played before where it was that kind of, “Oh, cool, so we can do anything, because we know this is going to end in 30 minutes,” which sets up a whole different kind of storytelling, which is super fun.
Yeah, I completely love it. I’m also very used to the longer form campaigns. As you know, I’m big on Critical Role, Dimension 20, so being like, “No, there’s an hour, and it’s not going to end well for them.” I’m like, “Cool.” You have to jump into this just going, “I’m going to do everything I want as quickly as possible,” and it works so well.
Anjali Bhimani: Yep. Kudos to all the DMs on this show, because that’s a whole other challenge. I imagine it’s unlike anything that they’ve done before as well.
Yeah, it has to be. Can you talk about your character’s decision to charge the monster at the end? Very brave.
Anjali Bhimani: What else are you going to do? You’re like, “This thing is destroying my friends. I’m just going to go in, I’m going to go wild, I’m going to tell the epic story. I’m going in.” I feel like she’s a big, the decision was more knowing the structure of the show, and knowing what we were here to do, and we were here to entertain.
Yeah. Again, not a smart decision, not a normal adventurer decision. A very inept, naive, has too much bravado decision. Yeah. It wasn’t, not the smartest decision, but definitely the most fun.
Went out in a blaze of glory, so it worked.
Anjali Bhimani: That’s the best part. I think that’s my favorite part about this show is how people go, and how people tell the story of how they go, and how everybody, the whole team sets it up for them to be able to tell a great story in those final throes or in those final moments. They’ve done such a fun thing here. I hope I get to do it many, many more times.
One of the things Matt and I have talked about is kind of how surprising it is the amount of heart there is in this show, because you would go in, expecting silliness, and then you kind of get whammed by this emotional moment, especially with the ending. Can you talk about that moment and what was going through your head when you got to give your character this closure?
Anjali Bhimani: Well, I think role-playing games in general, particularly the more involved ones like D&D, role playing games in general lend themselves to that. There is an epic journey happening, and you want your characters to have the full breadth of emotions. You think about, well, what are the kind of people that go into doing this? They’re not characters who don’t have that in them. You want them to have a chance to express that, and especially when they have previous relationships together.
Franklin and Finley, they’re just like, they’re tight. That’s going to be a sad moment if one of them has to go, even though they don’t really think that they’re going to have to go. I just love that. I love that about the TTRPG systems in general is that like life, comedy sits right on the heels of tragedy, sits right on the heels of comedy, sits right on the heels of tragedy.
Can you talk to me about playing in front of a live audience? I feel like that amps it up even more.
Anjali Bhimani: That was so fun. As you can tell, it’s a brain busting thing. I, being a theater kid, and being a theater person, my first, I think, 10 years of my professional career was all theater. Having an audience there was like coming home, and having other players there, and having people root for you. It’s like doing live play shows at conventions and other stuff.
It’s just a different vibe where you know that there is energy coming with you, and that you’re sharing energy with all the people in the room. I also loved knowing that a lot of people in the audience did not know the game, did not play D&D, just were there to support, and hopefully that they were going to have a good time too. Yeah, that was really, really fun.
I love that. Then what did you take from the experience of being on Faster, Purple Worm that you want to bring into other projects, like with DesiQuest?
Anjali Bhimani: That is such a great question, because I was actually talking with Luis Carazo about this yesterday, and this is actually very personal, so I’m going to say it anyway. I think people are always trying to see where they can do better in particular craft things and in their craft. I would like to be more… I want to be able to support people with my silence a little more. I tend to jump in, I want to jump in and play, and like, “Ooh, I got an idea, let’s go. We’re doing the thing.”
I know in longer term settings and in longer term campaigns, it’s easier to do that, because you don’t have to keep things, move, move, move, move, moving. I just want to remind myself that, unlike life, Anjali, you don’t have to solve these problems immediately. There’s no fire, or maybe there is a fire, but maybe it’s not your job to figure it out. Actually, continuing to let the story breathe, and letting other people step in and have their moments. I do feel like we do that a lot in longer campaigns. I know we did that so much in Candela Obscura, and in the Ravening War, and in DesiQuest for sure.
There are a lot of moments, special moments, where it is a conscious choice not to get involved. It was a conscious choice to say, “Yeah, my character could get involved, but that’s not what the story needs, and that’s not what that character’s story needs. That person needs this moment to be able to tell this story.” That’s always in the front of my mind when I’m playing. I did see, in this game, I definitely did see my desire to be like, “Okay, we got to do the thing right now. We got to do it. I got to solve it. I got to solve it. I got to move fast. I got to move fast,” when we knew we were going to die anyway, so I don’t know why I was trying to solve anything.
Yeah, that’s something that I always want to be better and better at is just supporting the stories of the people around me, and of the characters, the other characters in the game, and trusting that my story or whatever my character needs to do will come out organically from that. That, and also just have more fun. Have more fun. I always say that about my life. I take my fun very seriously, but I don’t take myself seriously. I just take my fun seriously. I think that there is room to take a little pressure off “getting it right,” and just enjoy the ride a little bit.
I adore both of those answers. I feel like this game for a lot of people was almost a reset, because it’s not what you usually get to do in D&D.
Anjali Bhimani: Absolutely. Absolutely. Also, even the difference between knowing that you are filming for an audience that is going to watch it online, versus filming with an audience right in front of you. There’s definitely a different energy that you bring to it, and it’s just a breath of fresh air that just adjusts your antenna a little bit, and puts you a little bit more in the moment, which I love.
It’s one of the reasons why I love doing theater as much as I can when I’m not doing all of the other things that I’m doing, because there’s no substitute for a live audience. There’s no substitute. There’s no singing in a studio versus singing for a live audience, doing a play versus doing television. There’s just no substitute for that energy. I’m just so grateful we got to experience it in such a fun way.
It’s so much fun to watch too, because the audience getting involved is such an unexpected, hilarious element.
Anjali Bhimani: Them coming up with the names, and just all sorts of stuff, it’s just a joy. Just a joy.
One of my favorite things about Purple Worm is that we get a new cast every episode, and just how different the casts are, because we have people like you and Aabria, who are very big in the TTRPG space. Then we have people that are like Seth Green, who is more known for his acting. Is there anyone, either that you did play with in Purple Warm, or that you didn’t get a chance to, that you want to play with in the future?
Anjali Bhimani: Oh, gosh, there’s so many people. If they’re going to keep going. I want more and more, yeah. I’m going to go, “Get me Patrick Stewart, get me Sir Ian McKellen, get me Helen Mirren, get me all the Brits.” I’m just going to name all the people that I want to work with, period. Get me Gary Oldman. Apparently I’m picking only Brits, I don’t know why. Let’s throw in Hugh Jackman. Hugh Jackman would be so much fun. He’s such a fun guy. He’s such a sweetheart. Yeah, I just love watching people play D&D for the first time.
I love it so much, or any role playing game for the first time. When we just did a Shadowrun series called Shadowrun: Excommunication, and we had started shooting, and I think we only had three days of shooting, and found out we had lost a guest star for the end of the shoot. I hit up my friend Emily Swallow, who plays The Armorer in The Mandalorian, and she had messaged me while a few weeks earlier, being like, “Oh, this stuff that you do is so cool. Really, how do I get to do this stuff?”
I’m like, “I’ll let you know next time we’re running a home game.” Instead, I was like, “Hey, you want to jump into this actual show, where you don’t know anything about the gameplay system, but we got you and it’s an open book test?” She was so game. She was so like, “Absolutely. Let’s go.” Watching her step into figuring out what a role playing game is, and also being a brilliant actor like she is, it’s so much fun. I honestly think that people who haven’t played before sometimes come up with the most incredible stuff.
Aimee Carrero, when she first started on Exandria Unlimited, spoiler alert, being like, “I am going to wrestle an alligator. I’m going to flip an alligator,” things like that that you wouldn’t, I would never have thought of. That, I would just have a fun time with anyone who is new to it.
I love it. I’m so excited for more. Your episode is so great. I’m like, “I need more Anjali for everything,” and I’m so glad for Purple Worm.
Anjali Bhimani: I’m so glad, I am too. I need more, please. Hire me, everyone, hire me. I love working. I am so grateful that we live in a world now where games, and television, and film, theater, and voiceover, and all of it is so mixed, because it used to be that I would have to isolate those experiences, but now that we can cross the streams, sorry, Bankman, now that we can cross the streams and actually do things together, I hope I get to do as many things.
I’ll sleep when I’m dead. I’m totally fine with that, because I’m having a lot of fun, doing all of the things that we have a chance to do, especially when you have friends, as creative as Matt, and Bill, and all of them over there. I’m very, very, very lucky. I’m really excited for people to see DesiQuest too. All these new shows that are happening are just, it’s very exciting.
I’m so excited to watch DesiQuest. I haven’t had a chance yet, and I am watching it over Thanksgiving. That is wonderful.
Anjali Bhimani: Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You’re going to have to let me know how you like it. I am very fond of it. Again, a new experience, a brand new experience in something that has been around for decades. It’s such a special thing to have that. I just love so much the artistic drive to innovate, to create something brand new, even within a certain amount of structure.
It’s precisely what makes people like Matt, and Aabria, and Jasmine, and Brennan, it makes them so brilliant is that they can create brand new things in a genre that maybe seemed like it was so limited. All of a sudden, there’s something new again. I’m so grateful, so, so grateful for all of this, and I’m so grateful they let me play with Purple Worm.
About Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!
“Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!” serves up comedic mayhem with tabletop gaming stars and celebrity guest players, including Seth Green, Anjali Bhimani, Skeet Ulrich, Sean Gunn, Mica Burton, Patton Oswalt and series co-creator Matthew Lillard. Perfect for seasoned gamers and newbies alike, every episode features an improvised, stand-alone story along with epic, hilarious character deaths.
Check out our other Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! interviews:
- Matthew Lillard
- Bill Rehor, Jon Ciccolini, Charlie Rehor, and Paul Shapiro
- Matthew Lillard and Bill Rehor
