I’m supposed to be talking to Matthew Lillard (Scream, Carrie) about Sangre de Agave, a new craft spirit the actor is releasing through his company, Macabre Spirits.
But first, his wife has a question. “My wife is like, ‘Why are you talking to Men’s Journal?’” says the actor, calling from a quick vacation in Hawaii. “She said, ‘You don’t have abs.’”
He might not have abs (I didn’t ask), but Lillard has lately become an important figure outside of his work on the big and small screens. He’s a successful gaming entrepreneur and, more recently, a spirits brand co-founder, alongside screenwriter Justin Ware. The duo’s Find Familiar Spirits has already released Quest’s End Whiskey, a fantasy-inspired line of brown spirits that won a few awards at the World Spirits Competition. And their other label, Macabre, offers up limited-edition booze releases combined with genre stories and artwork, including Rare, Fine & Limited, a sotol accompanied by a novella by modern master Mike Flanagan; Hell Is Not Mocked, a Texas whiskey with a story by best-selling author Christopher Buehlman; and Saltspray, a Jamaican rum with a story by Gemma Amor. Macabre is also behind the popular Ghost Face Vodka, which nods to Lillard’s work in the Scream franchise.
Andreas Branch
“We are not a celebrity-first brand, we’re community-first,” says Lillard. “I mean, I wish I was as big as The Rock or as famous as Ryan Reynolds. I’m neither of those things.”
Lillard ventured into the alcohol space after the success of Beadle & Grimm’s Pandemonium Warehouse, his high-end gaming company. “A friend called me and said, is there a way we can do the same thing with whiskey? And I immediately said yes,” says the actor. “The proposition of combining community and alcohol made absolute sense to me.”
He’s only been in the alcohol sector for a short time, but Lillard knows his booze. That said, I did kid him about Find Familiar’s website, where he discusses his love of the vodka cranberry. “I have to change that!” he admits. “It’s interesting, we built the company around the success of whiskey and bourbon, but the more I’ve gotten into this, the more I fall in love with tequila. I was in Jalisco last week touring distilleries, and I’m excited for what the future holds, spoiler alert.”
That said, Sangre de Agave is not a tequila. It’s a craft spirit made in partnership with a family of Mexican agave farmers. It begins with small-batch Mexican agave, slow-cooked and crushed to create a syrup that’s then distilled with spring-fed water. The result is a bit earthier and richer than the typical tequila blanco.
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“We work with authors on every release, and we let them write what they want and then we build the liquid around that,” says Lillard (Sangre de Agave features a short story by V. Castro, a two-time Bram Stoker Award-nominated Mexican-American writer, with cover art by Los Angeles-born artist RAH Azul). “We wanted something for Day of the Dead, so an agave spirit made sense. But getting a tequila out of Mexico as a young company in this short time frame proved impossible. We went with this agave spirit, which I think is fantastic. We built it off of Respeto, which is a pure agave extract.”
Lillard is using his post-vacation time this week to promote his brands at Total Wine, particularly Ghost Face, Macabre’s popular vodka launch. “We brought Ghost Face to market in February and sold $1.2 million of booze in less than an hour,” he says. During his booze shop tours, the actor will also be attending local screenings of SLC Punk, a fantastic late-90s cult film that he starred in.
Does the industry need another celebrity brand, even coming from a particularly well-liked actor? “I don’t know what the industry thinks of us,” Lillard admits. “But the reality is that our job is to create authentic community experiences that people resonate with. We’re never gonna be Tito’s. That’s not our business model. Our business model is that we don’t want to compete with the other 100 brands on the shelf. We are going to build for a community. If we can be the biggest spirit in the horror community, that’ll be successful.”
Sangre de Agave is available for $100 exclusively at the Find Familiar Spirits e-commerce store.
Related: Matthew Lillard Calls One of His Cult Classic Films a ‘Terrible Movie’
