Jeff Hays will voice Princess Donut in Peacock’s live-action adaptation of Dungeon Crawler Carl, and the casting landed the way fan news should: in front of a packed San Diego Comic-Con crowd. Hays was introduced during Penguin Random House’s Spotlight on Matt Dinniman panel, where he surprised fans while Chris Yost and Matt Dinniman were already onstage talking about the series.
The announcement matters because Hays is not just another voice in the franchise. He is the narrator and producer behind the LitRPG audiobook version of Matt Dinniman’s novel, and his performance has become part of how listeners know Princess Donut. The Audible version has racked up over 140 million listening hours, while Ace editions have spent more than 115 weeks on bestseller list. The books have also sold over 14 million copies across all formats, giving Peacock a fan base that arrives already attached to a very specific sound.
That attachment is exactly why this casting drew so much attention. Princess Donut is not a standard sidekick. She is the talking cat who can shoot lasers from her eyes and speak in the subterranean levels of the earth, and the story around her is built on an alien invasion that leaves the survivors trapped in a sadistic intergalactic game show. In that setup, Carl and Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk are forced to keep moving if they want to stay alive, which makes the voice behind her one of the few things the adaptation can get wrong without fans noticing immediately.
The live-action label also leaves one practical question hanging in the air: how does a television series handle a cat character whose defining feature is that she talks? The simplest answer is that the role belongs to Hays as a voice performance, which keeps the audiobook identity intact even if the character appears on screen in another form. What Peacock has not yet said is whether Hays will be the only performer tied to Princess Donut or whether more casting details are still to come.
For now, the move gives Peacock an easy bridge between the books and the screen version. It ties the adaptation to the voice fans already know, and it does it at the one place where a franchise announcement can still feel like an event. The remaining test is whether the show can keep that familiar voice intact while turning a laser-eyed, tiara-wearing cat into live-action television.
