Dr. Horrible’s Felicia Day on performing “Still Alive” at PAX08

I'm standing next to Felicia Day on the escalator, heading to our interview in a private room on the third floor of the Convention Center, and I ask her if she has had any time to walk around and enjoy the show. "No, I bought new dice, that was my big indulgence, I don't even have time to play the Lich King," she says. "Although I do have a beta key," she adds, hopefully, in the voice you or I would use to say we had our favorite snack waiting back at our apartment. 

This is Felicia Day, writer and star of the MMO-addicted online series The Guild, and of course she has more recently become known for her singing as Penny from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Just in case that's not enough, she also played the character Vi in eight episodes of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. She later tells me she's only recognized once a week or so in the great wide world, but this is different; at PAX, she is something of a superstar. "You have to have these handlers take you from place to place," she says, "or else you'd never get anywhere." It's easy to imagine Felicia needing the help of PAX's volunteer security squad to keep the crush of geek love in check; in person she's almost preternaturally slim, and pretty. Imagine walking up to the popular girl in high school to nervously ask her if she'd like to join your game of Dungeons and Dragons, and instead of being laughed at she asks if it's okay to dual-class.

Her geek-goddess status was cemented on the first night of the show when she joined Jonathan Coulton during his headlining set to sing "Still Alive," to the cheers and adulation of the crowd. You can watch Frank's shaky-cam video of that performance on Youtube, and you'll have to excuse the "Aww, hell yeah," at the beginning of the video. A member of our party became a little too excited.

"I went over and ran through the song like, once, and then we had a sound check," she tells me. "I'm not a rock star and I've never really used a mic before so... it was like a crash course in being a rock star. Thank goodness for Rock Band: it does come in handy, those skills." 

"It was kind of thrown together, it was his idea, and I just couldn't say no," she tells me to explain how the duet came to be. In terms of adding to the general excitement of having Day at PAX, it was a masterstroke: everyone was looking forward to Jonathan Coulton's set, everyone was waiting to hear "Still Alive," and to have Penny from Dr. Horrible handle vocals brought the house down.

"It ended up being so much fun, the crowd was so loving," she told me. We chatted about The Guild and Dr. Horrible for a while, and while that information will be coming your way in a feature about web-content, I had one more serious question: personally, would she pick Neil Patrick Harris or Nathan Fillion? To her credit, she gives it some serious thought. 

"Neil is a puzzle guy, he loves puzzles and magic," she says, "so we have a lot of outside commonalities... although Nathan is yummy, I have to say. Can I have one on the weekdays, and one on the weekends?" 

Ms. Day, you can have whatever you want.