If Felicia Day were any more adorable, we might think the Internet ingénue was as fictional as her character from Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. But when discussing her own online brainchild The Guild (seasons 1 & 2 now available on Amazon.com), it becomes clear as, well, day, that she’s the real deal. And really fabulous.

So how did The Guild come to life?
I was bored with my opportunities as an actor in Hollywood. I was making a living and working enough, but not enough to fill all the days. You know the life of an actor: it’s ups and downs. And I happened to be in a down and was playing video games for like 8 hours a day [Laughs] They’ve always been kind of my Achilles heel. I had a particularly bad bout with World of Warcraft. Have you played?

I’m the Atari-Super Nintendo generation, so these fancy first-person games just send me into sweaty cases of vertigo.
I have the same thing! I can’t do the first-person shooter stuff like Halo…it does make me a bit ill. Anyway, I was playing all the time and had an intervention by my friends. They said ‘you have to stop’ and I was like, ‘what am I doing with my life? I’m waiting around for auditions. I’m not getting cast in the role I wanted.’ So I thought why don’t I write something? And they always say write what you know and what I knew very well was gaming…and there’ s a bunch of really funny people I play with. I finally got off my butt and wrote a half-hour pilot [about them] called The Guild.

And then off to the web!
My co-producer Kim Evey had just had a viral hit in Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, this spoof of a Japanese talk show. And she was like ‘hey, we should do this for the web because that’s where the people you’re writing for are.’ When we decided to do it, well, it wasn’t easy, but once you set your mind to something, you don’t think about the insurmountable odds.[Laughs]

Why not pitch it to the networks or cable?
We shot the first couple of episodes with our own money, so in the back of my mind, I was thinking maybe somebody will see this and want to pick it up for TV or maybe give me some more acting opportunities. But it was such a rewarding process in itself, just to create things and bring people together—we had no money, everybody was kind of donating their time. And then when we uploaded the video and having so many people who saw it and wrote about it and spread the word about it…it was such a great experience that I realized what I was getting to do [on the web] was great.

Joss Whedon says The Guild inspired Dr. Horrible.
Yeah, I don’t like to take all the credit, because Joss is very generous. But I did bug him and he actually makes fun of my Guild pride. [Laughs] In the musical commentary to Dr. Horrible, he actually wrote in me plugging The Guild because I love promoting my show and helping people discover it. So when we were on the picket line [during the Writers’ Strike], I was walking around going ‘have you seen my show?’ and Joss said that he was thinking of doing a musical internet series about a supervillain. And I thought ‘that sounds awesome.’ Then a few months later, he emailed me asking if I could sing.[Laughs]

Thank god you could!
I did musical theater everywhere I moved…I was home-schooled. So the two consistent things in my life were local community theater and video games.

How many productions of Godspell have you done?
[Laughs] I think I only did one. But I did three Sweet Charitys…which is crazy. Being 14 and playing a prostitute? [Laughs]

And now you have a mad fanbase.
It’s really interesting. I’m very anti-celebrity culture and I really don’t like self-aggrandizing myself. I like to have the focus be on my show and encourage people to work outside the system. And the Internet culture likes that rebellious spirit. Also, I pride myself on being an Internet girl who isn’t exploiting her looks.

You have like 554,000 followers on Twitter. How do you keep up with them all?
I obsessively check my replies. I can't respond to everybody, but I do read all the responses.

And you appeared in the still-unaired 13th episode of Dollhouse, right?
Yep. I kind of have a huge role in that. I actually caused a bit a controversy by Twittering that it wasn’t going to air. It started an avalanche online. I love the show and it was so disappointing to me because this episode is so out-of-the-box and so innovative. It’s probably one of the show’s best episodes.

What can you tell us about it?
It is so outside the regular Dollhouse feel. It’s set 30 years in the future and it’s not constructed like the rest of the show. But it is part of the mythology and I think it’s going to blow the fans’ minds…it’s going to be on the DVD. And it will be shown internationally in June in some foreign country.

So what’s next?
Next is The Guild season 3. We’ll be shooting mid-June to mid-July and then rushing to get something ready for Comic-Con because we’re going to have a panel. Season 3 is confirmed with Microsoft releasing it and Sprint sponsoring it, which is unbelievable. It’s so rare in the webworld that you get renewed.

Well that’s huge! You should be really excited about this.
Thank you! And I hope this inspires other people to do this, too. I know how it feels not to be in control of your destiny. In Hollywood, you have to ask permission a lot and anyway you can go around that is awesome. [Laughs]