Critical Role & Sagas of Sundry - A Magic Moment with Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Extended Interview

Episode Date: October 12, 2026

Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt joins Geek & Sundry host Erika Ishii in this extended interview to recount his history with Magic: The Gathering. Follow them as they discuss playing the game in his younger years, the origins of hitRECord, and playing Dungeons & Dragons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trade ice skating at Nathan Phillips Square for ice cubes in your umbrella drink. Let Porter Airlines fly you from Toronto Pearson nonstop to 10 top sun destinations in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Costa Rica. Enjoy award-winning Porter service Toronto has loved for 20 years and start your vacation as soon as you're on the plane. Book your sunny getaway today at flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with a coffee plus range, infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like coffee plus B12 to help support immune function, and coffee plus B6 to keep your day moving.

Or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight. Our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover coffee plus on nispresso.com. You just appeared? Is that what happened? We did. I guess it was, it was like a Melier magic moment there. When I was a little boy, I would dream of being able to do special effects like that.

Really? Is there one that you still haven't gotten to do that you really want to do? No, I think I've done all of them now. All of them. I know, I might as well just die. Oh man. Well, we have the budget, I think, I think Wizards will give us the budget if you just want to incinerate or something. Okay. Or if you want to, you know, like Jace Bellar and then...

I know. Should I? Yeah. Yeah. Pretty cool. Magic. This is where the magic happens. You did that on purpose.

I did. It was a really good transition. I'm very proud of myself. So you are a long time magic player and you said that you have something cool. I do. I do. I'm excited. Yeah?

I'm actually really excited to look at this. I just spent yesterday feverishly looking for these and I was actually worried for a couple hours that I'd lost them. But I didn't lose them, thank God. There's another one. And the binder with the nice, the fancy cards. I haven't opened these boxes or this binder and I actually don't know how many years. I have a lot of memories about what's inside of here, but I haven't looked in a long time. This is such a time capsule.

It's exactly what it is. Right here. I'm surprised that there's no, the S, the little S's that we used to draw. Yeah, yeah. It looks like a lot of that sort of writing. You guys have, I mean, can you see this? It says Joey GL. Is that how you were a dress,

your preferred form of a dress back than Joey? Yeah, from age like probably seven to roughly 17. Everyone called me Joey. So you're Joe now, regular Joe right now. Yeah, yeah, these days I usually say Joe. So for this one, because we're going back in time, can I call you Joey? Yes, yes.

That's really funny and yeah, sure. We're taking it back to Magic Plan Joey G.L. I also like that I wrote magic here and also just in case that was missed M-Colent T-G. This is back when I had time to like really you know write things on cardboard boxes. It's like Carter unerthing the tomb of Tuduncommon and we're like going through the anti-chamber and we're looking at the rude the hyroglyphs here. This is also when K-Roc was really good. No offense to K-Roc nowadays.

but I don't even know actually what plays on Kerrock anymore. But back then it would have been like Nirvana Green Day Pearl Jam. Back then you had to have like cassettes of your favorite. I was more CDs but yeah. Oh okay. So we've set the scene for Joey G.L's MTG boxes. Listening that we've got K Rock on in the background, we probably can't because, you know, licensing. That'd be very expensive.

What's with these homies this in my girl? Yeah, all right. Is that expensive? Not expensive if I do that. It's like, you just had a couple of words. It's fine. It's fine. So what is in the boxes?

If I remember right, I had four decks that were like my creations. You had killer decks. Yeah, I had one I would call like a really killer deck. Like I put most of my effort into like the one kind of very ambitious masterpiece deck, which might or might not have been as effective as the red lightning bolt deck, which is like easier to make, but would, maybe win more often because it's sort of, it's a red lightning bolt deck. Do they still have lightning bolts? For me, I play red because it's very agro, because that is who I am as a player and

probably as a person. Yeah, okay. I like to strike, strike hard and fast and true. So there is still lightning bolt, but a lot of lightning bolt like things. A whole lightning bolt party, as you know. It's really awesome. And so you had a couple of choice decks, as you put it. And you, did you play just with friends?

Did you ever go down to your local game store and people playing? Yeah, that's the thing. Like, I became adjacent more recently to the world of comics because I was in a big comic book movie. I never really read a lot of comic books when I was young, but I feel very familial towards that culture because I played D&D and I played magic and it was the same stores. So you were hanging around with the same people. Yeah, so when you hang out with the geeks at the local, essentially geek store, they have comics, video games, tabletop games,

magic gathering tournaments and Pokemon and, I remember when Pokemon started coming out and me being like, so it's like magic. So they ripped off magic, okay, great. Pretty much. It's, yeah, because Magic the Gathering was the sort of trading card game, I think, that all of the, I thought they were,

the cool kids were playing. And then all the rest of us would, you know, kind of try and get in on that world with other cards like UGAO or Pokemon or we saw that. But magic was just starting that. When I would go to comic stores and play magic, it was still pretty new. I didn't start right at the very beginning. Like there were still the storied older sets, the Blackboarder like beta set or even the Alpha set. There was Arabian Nights and Legends where the expansion sets that came out before I got into it.

And when I got into it, it was the dark was what was out. That was the expansion set that it was out. And I guess third edition is what the basic set was. But it was white border, not as cool as the black border. What got you into magic? What made you... It was my D&D friends. Yeah?

It was D&D that I got into first. You fully did D&D? What edition? I had different books. I'm sort of, I don't know, my take on D&D is that any official like codification of D&D is outside of the core of what D&D really is. This is one of the things I love about D&D is there is no product. At the end it's house rules.

At the end it's two or more people basically telling a story together talking. With sometimes you should use probably dice. Like I like that there's dice here. So there would usually be like dice like this around when we would play magic. I used to play D&D with a guy who was around. with Gary Gygax. Wow. And he, like, taught a class at, like, a summer camp

at a school in the valley where I, you know, grew up. And he would talk about D&D before they even made 20-sided dice. And he was like, you had to roll D6 and a D-10. And if the six was even, then you'd add 10 to whatever you got on the D-10. So this would be a 12. Yeah. And it's funny that all the basic mechanics of it can change drastically, but really what the core of it is, as you said,

just telling stories with friends. This is what I love about D&D. Yeah. And Magic, I mean, I will admit that as a D&D fan, when I first saw Magic, before I really knew what it was, I was resistant because it was new, and it was a thing that you had to buy. And I loved that D&D, you didn't really have to buy anything.

Yeah, well, one person generally knows the rules and maybe it has the book and everything. Or some books. But then it's just everybody else. else brings their imagination into it. Once my friends started getting into magic, and once I started getting into it, I was like, actually, there really is something uniquely creative

about this that's different than D&D, because the structure that the cards lend gives you sort of creative constraints. And sometimes when you're trying to be creative, constraints is exactly what you need. If you're just looking at a blank page, you're like, tell a story about anything. Sometimes you can be like, well, I don't know.

What should I tell a story about? But when there's cards like that, then, all sorts of stories start just coming up that you're you know inspired to think of from the card yeah is there a character from magic that you would want to play in d and d that's a funny question i don't think we ever did that um i mean like you know the super rare card at that time that you kind of you would want to be the royal assassin because he's such a badass right but i would say probably i identify more than in fact i think my my best deck was a was a tim deck which I don't know if they still call him Tim,

but back then they used to call the prodigal sorcerer Tim, which was Monty Python reference. Right, Tim the Enchanter. There are some who called me Tim. Yeah, okay. So you know the answer? Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm a huge python. Okay, but did you know that the prodigal,

I don't know if you know what a prodigal sorcerer is? I did not know that, no. The prodigal sorcerer, everyone used to call him Tim, and you would make a Tim deck. This, my deck was sort of a Tim deck. It was an ambitious, extra Tim deck. The core of it, I guess, was a Tim deck, but like, it was, it was a lot. There's a lot going on in it.

You could totally translate Tim into a D&D character. For sure. The person who can, like, remotely just cause you damage without you ever noticing or getting like a chance to take your own shot back at him. It's sort of a passive aggressive move, but. Tim, the passive aggressive chanter. He doesn't stand directly in front of you and hit you. He's like off somewhere else where you can't reach him.

Yeah. Like, oh, you're talking me? That's fine. That's cool. I'll just, let's be over here. So just to linger on history for a second, what I remember most about playing D&D or playing magic is my friends, right?

Because ultimately it's not really about these things, it's about the connection that they can- I would not be playing this in a vacuum now. Even though once I got into it, I would spend hours by myself putting together decks, but the whole time I'm like waiting to show my friends. Yeah. I think there's nothing like,

being creative with your friends. And games like this, I think, games that are not just skill-based, but games that really require creativity, is an opportunity for friends to be creative together and have that. And I think in a certain way that playing these games when I was a teenager, I think that these games really impacted all of my creative sensibilities. Yeah, because one thing, I had been a member of hit record,

since about 2012. That's awesome. I know. And I actually, you know, one of my closest friends and collaborators, I did a show with Talas and Jaffe here. So the idea of hit record as a place for people to collaborate and tell stories and create worlds to live in and play in together, it has that same feeling. I bet I bet I wouldn't have made it record if it hadn't been for playing D&D and Magic.

I bet you. Oh my God, that makes me really really. It's probably true though. I mean, yeah, because hit record is all about, okay, we're online and we're being creative, but not just for the sake of being like, hey world, look at me, look at my thing that I made, please give me your hearts and your thumbs up because it's all about me and what I made. Because online culture can be that way. Sometimes.

Sometimes. But that's the thing is if you choose your tribe online and choose your community, you can choose to be part of something like HitRecord or a lot of the Magic of the Gathering and Dungeons in the dragons community that I know that is aggressively kind and positive and wants new ideas and new voices to come join them and play. So that's, those are exactly the principles that we try to embody on a platform.

One of the reasons that I started playing magic on the show was I was learning actively from a friend. He was like, let me teach you magic. And we streamed it here live. So I made a lot, a lot of mistakes of magic, the gathering live in front of an audience. Also, there's a magic, the gathering online game, and so we were able to take people from our online community

and say, okay, here's our screen name, come, just play a game with us. That's fun. Wow, I've never played it online. There's different barriers to entry for whatever reason. If you can't sit down with somebody and play this game, you can play with them online and that just makes my heart feel good. Yeah, likewise, that's really great.

So I feel like it's time to crack the seal. Time to open them? Okay. I'm excited. I'm hesitant to I open this, but there might be D&D. New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with a coffee plus range, infused with functional benefits.

Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like coffee plus B12 to help support immune function, and coffee plus B6 to keep your day moving. Or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight. Our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change. your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover Coffee Plus on Espresso.com. Amazon has everything you need to deliver joy to everyone on your list, like your Uncle Ricky, who made every single one of your wedding photos unforgettable, because his fly was open. So get him

a three-pack of new underpants who'll really love, and get a head start on holiday shopping with low prices on gifts everyone wants, like the latest toys and housewares, and the gifts they need, like underpants. We've got you covered, Ricky. Literally. Characters in here. Should I open it? Yeah, yeah.

Okay, let's, yeah, let's... Yes, this is. This is a D&D character right here. Wow. Oh my gosh. Her name is Alanis. She's an elf, a mage thief. She has an 18 dexterity,

which means she's fast as well. Oh, wow. Yeah, that is... She has a short sword plus three plus three, and that can cure light... Cure light. Cure light wounds? Yeah, I guess cure light wounds. I was abbreviating Curelight Wumes once a day.

But Joey knew what you meant. Joey definitely did. Her alignment was CN, which stands for chaotic neutral. This is amazing and blows my mind. And I also have old notebook paper with characters that I made up. But then I got into magic a lot later. So you're new to magic. And I'm the old school.

Okay. So you might not even know these cards. No. So I'm really excited to look at them. I had a weird thing when I was playing. because I was already acting. So I had more money than my friends did, but it wouldn't have been fun to just like spend tons of money

and like be able to beat all my friends with like all the fancy cards. And like the one time I was like, but fuck it, I'm gonna buy the moxas. And so I did. So I have, yeah, but I traded one of them, Sapphire, Ruby, and Jet. So I traded my pearl.

I don't remember where or what I got for it. What did you trade? Yeah. I remember what I got for my mox pearl. That's too bad. I should remember that. I'm sure I got ripped off. Well, you have all these other moxes.

I see manipulator. I mentioned Royal Assassin earlier. That was the killer combo. If you had an icy manipulator and a Royal Assassin, you could just pick off anybody. Because an icy manipulator taps somebody, and the Royal Assassin can kill anything that's tapped. Whoa.

And so you're just... This, I think, was actually the first rare card that I remember pulling this. So you bought this? Yeah, no, I didn't buy this as a single card. I pulled this out of, yeah, booster pack of the Revised of Third Edition. And you usually are, like, you can count on getting like one really rare card in a whole box of those.

And I was like, what am I gonna get? Am I gonna get a Royal Assassin? Am I gonna get a Shevan Dragon? I got a nightmare, which is dope and probably why I always, you know, sort of lean towards playing black because I had a nightmare. Which just means that the more swamps you have,

the bigger this nightmare horse gets and it flies. There is something really magic about acquiring a rare card by chance, as opposed to specifically going out and purchasing it. Yeah. So did you build a deck around that? At that time I did. I don't think any of my later decks, which is what's in these boxes, revolved around nightmare.

I did have a big, good black deck for a while with this guy and the Sanger Vampires and the nether shadows and dark rituals and all that. stuff. I wonder if that deck's still in here. That would be, that deck might... Can I open this block and see if this is in here, actually? I'm curious if that stayed alive. You think it's in that one? These look like the decks. This looks like, this is just extra stuff. Oh wow. So I think these are probably the decks. It's really funny. This is that. Okay, this is that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Demonic Tudor. I think they took the pentacle off of this guy. This is the...

Yeah, they probably want to stay away from imagery that people might get a little spooked by. Yeah, well. I think it's metal. Metal A.F. Nothing that much worse about a pentagram than any other symbol that you might name. Let's see. I agree. Black Knight.

Yeah, so the black deck. This is strong. So this is your awesome black deck. I probably have a proxy in here for the nightmare because the nightmare obviously belongs in here. Stone throwing devils. This is from Arabian Knights. These were cool. Oh, right, first strike.

I forgot so much all these things. First Strike. These are, yeah. That's what I remember like figuring out the ratio. It was, you know, one power, one toughness, but it also had a special ability. So to be able to put it out for just one man, I was like, that's a strong creature.

That's really good. I don't know why. This is like a really common card, but maybe sort of my favorite. I just love the art of it. I love the idea of a ritual is like speaking of like incorporating how I came to think of creativity. Ritual is a big part of it, repetition,

you know, having a ritual around your creativity. And so a dark ritual, which also just allows you to act really fast. If you have this in your opening hand, hand and you can get three manor right away before anybody else has any land out. That's killer. Did you ever buy or make decks because it was really cool as opposed to building it around strategy? As opposed to it being effective.

Yeah. This black deck is that. Okay. This is your cool deck. This isn't necessarily the probably the most winning deck, but this is, it's black. I mean, it's the black deck. Yeah. That's funny.

I have two black decks. Wow. I mean, that makes sense. Yeah, sure. Mine, twist. one black deck and some days you're feeling another black deck. That's funny. Okay, yeah, I think because this is, this is like another shadow deck. This is all about like little black creatures.

And I think if I'm not mistaken, this is... New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with a coffee plus range infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like coffee plus B12 to help support immune function. And coffee plus B6 to keep you. your day moving or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight our new double espresso with ginseng extract whatever lies ahead don't change your morning let your morning change you discover coffee plus on espresso dot com you've got your favorite blanket a freshly poured drink and a cold case

burning a hole in your streaming queue you're not just watching true crime you're running the investigation from the comfort of your couch welcome to murder she watched the podcast where we recap dissect and slightly overanalyze some of the best and craziest true crime documentaries on our favorite streamers. Did the spouse do it? Why is the shady neighbor wearing leather gloves in July? Why did this guy agree to be interviewed in this documentary? We ask the tough questions that you're often just screaming at your TV. So every week, we break down the twists, red herrings, and absurd documentaries that have kept you up all night. It's high drama. cozy vibes and absolute couch detective energy.

Grab your throat blanket and hit subscribe. Search murder she watched wherever you listen to podcasts, and let's solve this thing together. Like the Sanger Vampire, kind of like bigger black creatures deck. Cool. This is probably the more like sophisticated black deck. This is the thinking man's black deck.

Yeah, right? And this is me like reluctantly using an Ice Age dark ritual. They redrew dark ritual, But I still used it because I had it. Oh yeah, and they redrew icy manipulator too, which also pissed me off. No, man. Change like the things that I grew up with are far superior to the new stuff. Exactly, exactly, which is the essence of conservatism.

I guess in this, as in life, it doesn't matter if you're old school or new school, you're still playing a game together. Sorry, I came upon the Royal Assassin, so I'm sorry. This is, I think, a fourth edition Royal Assassin. You can tell it's a little brighter than... Yeah, see, look. Here's my third edition Royal Assassin. Oh, cool. And the colors are a little more saturated

and that blacks are a little blacker. But this is the first one I got. This is the third edition Royal Assassin. So this... Oh, Mirror Universe. Wow, forgot about this. This is the Tim Debt. This was really my masterpiece.

This is like my fun black deck. And then I think this, which I didn't even put into sleeves, is my like cheesy lightning bolt deck, which was probably really effective. That's more of my style. Right on. Well, this really, this probably won as often, if not more often than the Tim Deck,

even though the Tim Deck I spent much more time and care on. This would be like making a superhero movie versus making like, art house movie. You know, make a superhero movie. You're like, yeah, people are gonna like it. You're like, you know people are gonna like it. Yeah. It's easier than it is to make an art house movie.

But there's something that still draws you to like make the art house Also, actually though, the reverse would be true because this was way cheaper to make and this is very expensive. So it would be as if you made like a cheap but effective superhero movie and a really expensive and perhaps less effective art house movie. A really bad move in the movie business, but that's what I did. There are considerations to be made in creating all art. Poss, you know, what it means for your soul to make it, whether people like it or not. Who did you play with?

I mostly played with a certain friend group. It was Nick and Ian and Jesse. Mostly those three guys. Bobby also, sometimes Riley. And it would be at sleepovers, and it would involve Pizza Hut and Weezer. Magic and D&D and staying up really late and just playing and playing and playing.

That is 100% my high school experience with that, Weezer and everything. Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. We would commandeer. our friends living room for this. And the parents were always very understanding. I think they were just happy we weren't getting into too much mischief.

Yeah, true enough. You're not out like in danger if you're playing with your imagination. It's true. It's a really good thing. And actually there are a lot of after school clubs and extracurricular programs for D&D and Magic the Gathering now. Full support. Yeah.

Do any of your friends still play Magic? I have some friends who I think do play D&D like over Skype with each other. But they're not my friends who I used to play with. My friends who I used to play with, one is doing like crazy confidential tech in the Navy or something like that. One was living in China for a while. I don't know what Jesse or Bobby or Riley are doing. And no, I haven't played with them.

forever, it would be crazy. I would love to. I don't get to play D&D with any of my friends that I used to. Is that right? Yeah. That would be fun. I want to fun. Like having a reunion. Yeah, you should do that. You should do that. You should do that. You should do that. You should do that. Okay, I'm gonna try to do that. Yeah. The last time I played magic was probably four or five years ago. It wasn't with these cards though. It was someone that worked at HitRecord. Her name is Abigail. And like, she and I would talk about it at the office. I'd be like, we have to

play sometime. So it's Sundance when she brought her cards and we stayed up and played. Yeah, I remember there was some kind of argument about the behavior of nethershadows and whether they were, whether you could, you know, the difference between buried and removed from game entirely and the difference actually made a big impact on who won the game. I hope I wasn't too bossy, but I think I also was right. I love this. There was like the Sundance, the cool Sundance after party is arguing about Magic the Gathering. It was. And the difference between buried and removed from game entirely.

I don't know if those are still terms nowadays, but this is a difference. Yeah. No, it's true. Although I have to say that it's really lovely that there's such a great online community for this that you can probably have tweeted it out and somebody would have come out with the answer for you. And they would have said that I was right. Amazon has everything you need to deliver joy to everyone on your list. Like your Uncle Ricky, who made every single one of your wedding photos

unforgettable because his fly was open. So get him a three-pack of new underpants he'll really love and get a head start on holiday shopping with low prices on gifts everyone wants, like the latest toys and housewares, and the gifts they need, like underpants. We've got you covered, Ricky, literally. For 50 years, Canadians have wondered what the names of IKEA furniture mean, like Natopa, the guardrail for children's beds. Natopa means giving your favorite person room to grow. It means their safety and your piece of... No.

In Swedish, Natapa means night monkey. IKEA, 50 years of Swedishness at home. Look, he's wearing little pajamas. So cute. Oh, please, not that music. That music gives me nightmares from my childhood.

Could we get something a little bit lighter? Some lighter music here. Are you a fan of True Crime TV? shows. And what about Unsolved Mysteries? The show that jumped started all of our love of true crime. I'm Ellen Marsh. And I'm Joey Taranto. And we host I Think Not, a true crime comedy podcast covering some of the wildest stories from your favorite true crime can't be TV shows all the way to Unsolved mysteries. Baby, you will laugh, you will cry. You'll think about true crime in a whole new way, and you'll also ask yourself, who gave these people mics? New episodes of I Think Not are released every Wednesday

with bonus episodes out every Thursday on Patreon. And every Monday, you can listen to our True Crime Rundown, where we go over the top true crime headlines of the week. So come and join us, wherever you listen to your podcast.