This is Later with Lee Matthews, The Lee Matthews Podcast more of what you
hear weekday afternoons on the Drive. It's the award winning story Time podcast to
heard everywhere you get podcasts, including the iHeartRadio app. Will McFadden is the
host. He is also the chief creative officer at Colab. The Actors Gang,
let's start there, Will, What is the Actors Gang? Well,
Uh, the the Actors Gang is Actually it's a it's a Comedia del Arte
based theater company in Los Angeles. Uh, and it was I Actually I
recently I've left the Actors Gang, so I have to update the bio that
resume. But uh, but uh, it's it's a great theater company where
I was there for ten years and I got to do amazing shows and do
some and travel the world actually doing theater, which is pretty rare. Well,
you've got some big names that were also a member of members of that,
and I gather Uh, Storytime podcast is drawing on that talent pool.
Yeah, we have some. Yeah, we have some amazing guests. And
actually you mentioned Collab, which is a company that my brothers I founded,
which is a it's a digital creator studio and tech company. So we work
with a lot of people from TikTok, YouTube creators, Instagrammers, and you
know a lot of creators who do Storytime style content. So that was kind
of the impetus for starting the podcast was we have all these these creators that
we know and work with who are telling stories on their channels, so why
not get them on the podcasts and share never before heard stories that their fans
would love to hear. Will Nick Fadden Storytime? What are some of the
stories you're telling on Storytime? Um? You know, I I don't really
get to tell that many stories. Nobody, nobody who wants to hear my
stories. But the guests that we have on our you know, are full
of them. And uh, you know the stories that that that are on
the podcast, they're they're true. They're real anecdotes from people's lives, so
they're not you know, uh, made up stories. Um. But we've
had some amazing guests, especially this season. We had we had Writers Strong
on from Boy Meets World or Pod Meets World, and he told he told
a great story. He's he's a he's a If you're don't familiar with Heartthrob
writer Strong, he's a he's he was a child actor, but he's actually
a professor now. But he told the story about the first acting gig that
he ever had. He was in this production of lame Is in San Francisco,
and he talked about how when he was on break he would run around
the Tenderloin and he played Gavroche, which is like this little street urchin,
but he would run around with all the homeless people in San Francisco, and
he thought it was just kind of an extension of the stage and didn't understand
the difference between like this the riff raff of leme Is and then like that
these were actually unhoused people, you know, living in San Francisco, and
it's just this. It's this really great story about his first ever acting gig,
and I don't think it was a story you'd ever told before. So,
yeah, a lot. There's a lot of great every The thing is,
I think everyone has at least one great story to tell, and that's
kind of what we're after on hashtag storytime. Sounds like he was a method
actor and didn't realize it. Yeah, I think, yeah, he hadn't.
He hadn't read the book yet, but it was in his own Will
McFadden's Storytime the podcast heard on wherever you get podcasts, including the Heart Radio
app and Will, what brought you to this was it? Was it your
work in digital or was it your work in theater? Yeah, it's actually
it's kind of a marriage of both. Um on the digital side, I've
noticed and I've been I've been a content creator myself since the MySpace days to
really date myself, but one thing I've noticed is ever since YouTube came out,
that there's always been the genre of story time content where people sit down
in front of their camera and they share a story either from their life or
from their day, and and it's always been a hugely immensely popular style of
short form content. So we thought that that would be great fertile ground for
us to find content creators out there who are storytime creators and share those those
those stories on the podcast. So that was kind of where it came from.
And also it came out of the pandemic for me as a theater actor
obviously couldn't get into a theater to perform, to tell any stories, So
it made sense to to kind of merge those two loves of the mind of
storytelling and this, you know, the emerging platform of podcasting, Will McFadden's
Storytime. I'm a big fan of it because I've always been a spoken word
guy, and I've always been a fan of either audiobooks or radio plays,
even going back to when I was a kid, I wanted to get into
this business. I had a collection of some of the old radio dramas that
I would listen to, and I loved the pictures that were painted in your
brain. So for me, this it sounds for me. I feel like
everybody's just catching up to what I was doing for years. Your youth at
the trend. Maybe I did. Yeah, I mean it is. It
is the oldest form of entertainment. You know. We would sit around a
campfire and we would we would share our stories, and that was how we
used to entertain ourselves before before Netflix and Hulu, there was the you know
this this camp the camp fire story time that was that was television. Yeah,
well it's It's even spilled over into my personal life when whenever I get
a note or a letter from my mother, I've taken to my I'll get
my wife. Hey, honey, I got a wife. I got another
letter from mom, here we go, and I fire up a music bed
and so dear ones. You know. Then I go into the letter.
And I haven't told mom that I do that, but it just makes it
more entertained. My mom's so flowery and and and when she she can't write
a simple hey how are you doing kind of note, it has to be
this long, flowery description of things. So so I just turned it into
a radio play. Well, she knows about it now, she does,
Yes, she does, she does, Will ms. I hope her letters
now have like more characters than them, and you know, you get to
do all sorts of yeah, yeah, the door opened creakily. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, it's mom. Just call. We've got phones,
just call. Oh. Story time with Will McFadden. Will McFadden is
with us. What are some of the ones that have stood out in recent
seasons? You know, Uh, we had a great We've had a ton
of great guests. Um, one of the ones that that comes to mind
is, uh, Lucky Yates. He's great. He's a great actor,
voice over comedian, he was a he was a voice on the animated show
arch Arger. Yeah, we've had him on this, we've had him on
the program a couple of times. I love the guy. Okay, yeah,
yeah, So you guys know Luck friend of the pod U. Yeah,
but Lucky told this great story about he was he was hosting This is
I don't know twenty years ago, but he was hosting an award show,
co hosting, and he was h he had a monkey puppet that was the
host and and you know, whenever you have a puppet on your hand,
it gives you carte blanche to kind of say anything. And at some point
Burt Reynolds accepted an award and didn't like the cut of the monkey's jib and
tried to break Lucky Yates's arm, tried to grab it and wrestle it off
of his hand, and Lucky Yates was saying all he could think of in
that moment was Burt Reynolds is so weak. He was in his older Yeah,
yeah, Lucky, He's got a great story. But I mean,
we've had some really amazing guests. Adam Paley from from Happy Endings and The
Mini Project and his newest show one hundred and one Place at the party before
he died, he had a great story that was actually really poignant. You
know, Adams a comedy guy, but he told this kind of dark,
poignant story about his mother passing and it was it was never I don't think
he's ever told that story before. So that's one of my favorite episodes as
well. We are talking to Will mc fadden story Time the podcast. I
guess I should say hashtime story story Time, right, is that officially the
well? Yeah, we we we started as story Time and then h Seth
Rogan showed up on the podcast scene with a podcast called The story Time,
didn't I guess he didn't bother to check if there was any other story Time
podcasts out there, because he's like, well, m Seth Rogan, who
cares? Yeah, and so we we we pivoted, We adjusted around Seth
and we added a hashtag tours, which it makes a little more sense because
ours is sort of that that Internet style of storytelling, that that genre of
hashtag storytime. Yeah, so hashtag storytime. I stand corrected with Will mc
fadden. Everywhere you get podcasts, including the iHeartRadio app. Thank you for
joining us my pleasure, Thank you, thanks for listening to Later with Lee
Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live
weekday afternoons from five to seven and I Heearts Media Presentation