UT alum Felicia Day talks SXSW, acting, gaming career

As an actress, Felicia Day has made appearances on network and cable television shows including "House," "Lie to Me" and "Monk." But she'll be most familiar to attendees of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival as Codex from "The Guild," an extremely popular Web series that features Day in an ensemble of Internet role-playing gamers.

She also had a key role in a little thing called "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," a wildly successful online project Joss Whedon knocked out during the 2007-08 Writers Guild strike.

As a trailblazer in the form, the smart, polite and funny redhead is uniquely qualified as a keynote speaker to address how techies (Day is a voracious gamer) are challenging traditional paradigms of entertainment creation and distribution. And, as SXSW promotional material points out, her use of social media makes her a natural fit for the theme of "community" that will permeate this year's gathering.

Day, who graduated from the University of Texas, discussed her upcoming appearance and other topics in advance of SXSW. Here is a transcript of our conversation, edited for space and clarity:

Austin American-Statesman: I'm very impressed with how open you are to interacting with your fans. It's unusual.

Felicia Day: It is a little bit unusual. But, you know, I started doing this when people didn't really use the words "social media," so I built my show from the ground up. And in the early days there were dozens of fans, so I was able to know them on a name-by-name basis. And then that just sort of spread.

How do you feel about going from SXSW panelist to keynote speaker? Is that just a ton of pressure?

I'm trying not to think about it that way. Ironically, when I was going to UT, I volunteered for SXSW for a couple of years in a row, and I did a lot of bag-stuffing and helping with badges and checking badges as people came in. I guess it's a SXSW Cinderella story. (Laughs) It was the film side that I was sort of discovering and wanting to get into as a career. I certainly would never have thought that my computer games that I played during that time and during college would lead me to keynoting for Interactive.

You certainly found an inventive and successful way to straddle those two disciplines.

Thank you. That's the cool thing about the Internet. There is a way to be everything you want to be, in a sense; you can define yourself in a brand-new way that didn't necessarily exist a decade ago or whatever. It's very liberating. It's like democracy for creativity, the Internet, and I'm very, very privileged to be one of the people who represent that.

What will you be discussing in your keynote address?

I think that we're going to touch upon my journey a little bit ... I'm sure that we'll be talking about social media a lot ... "The Guild," in the past 31/2 years, has experienced an amazing revolution in how we use the Internet and connect with other people, and I'm sure that's something that would be of interest to the people who are coming to my panel.

After you were here in 2009, you wrote that you would summarize South by Southwest attendance as ‘paying for parties from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. with the option of going to panels on off hours.'

(Laughs)

Are you sorry you said that, and do you hope people are still going to attend your panel?

I didn't mean for it to be like, "Nobody ever goes to panels." But I think that a lot of the motivation is connecting with other people, whether it's on the floor of the Convention Center during the panel hours or after hours to go to the parties and the gatherings and meet-ups. Interactive is probably even more unique than the music and film side in that people know each other on the Internet — sometimes as very good friends — but they've never met face-to-face. It's kind of ironic and a testament to how the world has changed that I know some of these people whom I have never met in person better than I do some of my relatives whom I don't keep up with. And it's about building community and making that community more solid by forging face-to-face connections. There are a lot of parties, though. I'm kind of an early riser, early bed person, so I'll be going to more of the cocktail hours.