'Scooby Doo' star Matthew Lillard reveals why he turned down 'DWTS'

Scooby Doo star Matthew Lillard has a specific reason for not joining Dancing with the Stars.

Lillard, 54, said in a new interview that he got the option to star in DWTS after Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, in which he played Shaggy, flopped in 2004.

“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,” Lillard told Business Insider. “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 went on to share that he’d expected to get many acting offers after the Scooby Doo movies, but the opposite happened.

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

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

Matthew Lillard went on to get supporting roles in The Descendants and Clint Eastwood’s Trouble With the Curve.