Do we like Matthew Lillard?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Loud, consistent support for trans youth and migrants and honest about his own missteps, with a thinner record on charity and no court trouble found.
Lillard broke through as Stu Macher in the original Scream in 1996, then became Shaggy in the live-action Scooby-Doo films. The second Scooby film in 2004 was followed by a long, lean patch. He has said there were moments in his career when “I never thought I'd work again”.
He told Variety he resented Scooby-Doo for a long time and joked it was Scooby's fault he wasn't working. He has said it was a humbling stretch and that he had been caught up in a drive to be famous. That kind of candour is a big part of why people like him.
Then came the Tarantino stoush. After Quentin Tarantino said on a podcast that he doesn't care for Lillard as an actor, Lillard shrugged it off at GalaxyCon in December 2025 before admitting “It hurts your feelings.” He added that he's “very popular in this room” but not in Hollywood. Fans and colleagues rallied round him, which he later described as strangely like a funeral.
On the harm check, his record is clean and then some. At a Scream screening in Los Angeles in November 2025 he swore at ICE, told the crowd “we need to lead with love”, and urged a yes vote on California's Proposition 50. In October 2026 on a podcast he spoke up for trans youth and said cancelling people is horrific.
The Scream 7 story is the interesting one. Barrera was cut from the film over her posts about Gaza, and Spyglass said it did not support them. At a September 2026 Q&A, Lillard said he hadn't thought about her situation when he returned, called himself “on the wrong side of history” for that and said she is “on the right side of history”. Where you land on the Gaza politics will shape how you read that, but it was an unprompted admission and it cost him nothing.
His recent work is a nostalgia boom: Scream 7, Five Nights at Freddy's, a role in the Carrie series and more. We didn't find anything flagging dodgy company, but we also haven't gone through every credit. The harm test is judged on his own words and acts, and those are good.