Matthew Lillard Reveals Why He Turned Down 'Dancing With the Stars' In the Past

Matthew Lillard is opening up about turning down a chance to compete on Dancing With the Stars.

The 54-year-old actor opened up about his struggles earlier in his career in a new interview and revealed how he thought he would be a big name actor after Scooby-Doo.

However, after the second movie didn’t succeed as well, he had to learn to manage his expectations.

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“I thought I’d be No. 1 on the call sheet for the next 10 years of movies,” he told Business Insider. “And the reality was, the exact opposite happened.”

Matthew then had to reevaluate his career and his team pitched him for DWTS, but he wasn’t exactly thrilled about that idea.

“I was going to do Dancing with the Stars. And I was like, if I do Dancing with the Stars, I’ll never win an Academy Award,” he shared. “If I do Dancing With the Stars, I’ll be famous and not a great actor, and I really just wanted to be a great actor.”

He then decided he just wanted “to be an actor. I just want to be in movies. I want to reset my expectations.’”

Matthew even admits he got “caught up in the success of what I was doing.”

“I was caught up in the parts I was getting, I was caught up in this drive to be quote-unquote famous,” he said. “I’ve gone through good patches and bad patches. I’ve been irrelevant and thought I was never going to work again.”

“I’ve been at all aspects of the career, and I love where I’m at right this second,” Matthew admits.

If you didn’t know, since the live-action Scooby-Doo movie in the early 2000s, Matthew has gone on to voice Shaggy in many Scooby-Doo projects, and continues to do so!