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