Dungeon Crawler Carl casts Jeff Hays as Princess Donut for Peacock’s series
The most important voice in LitRPG just became television canon. Peacock’s live-action Dungeon Crawler Carl — from Matt Dinniman’s books, with Seth MacFarlane in the adaptation orbit — announced audiobook narrator Jeff Hays as Princess Donut at San Diego Comic-Con, the series’ first official casting.
Why Donut had to be Hays
Hays has voiced the entire Carl run on Audible; Dinniman called him the non-negotiable pick the moment casting talks started. Hays says he has already seen mo-cap cat footage and does not expect the voice to drift far from the audiobook icon. Carl and Donut remain Earth survivors forced into the Syndicate’s galaxy-spanning snuff dungeon show.
SDCC activation energy
Audible’s Level Up Lounge gave fans Crawler Incident Report booths beside Bobiverse toys — proof the IP’s audio-first fandom is the marketing engine Peacock wants to convert. Premiere date TBA; the SEO win is “Princess Donut cast” landing next to every Carl book search.
“If you could pick any character to play, who would it be? Donut — before we even had a casting conversation.”
— Jeff Hays / Matt Dinniman — Bleeding Cool SDCC interview (2026)
Goddamn donuts. The crawl is coming to cameras — and the cat already sounds right.
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