Don’t be surprised if you see folks dressed up as movie and TV characters on the Metro this week.
Awesome Con is celebrating 10 years at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. In fact, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser will officially declare Friday as a citywide “Awesome Con Day.”
“We are going into our 10th anniversary of Awesome Con,” Show Director Lauren Dabb told WTOP. “We are so excited to celebrate those 10 years and everything that we’ve gone through together in the last 10 years, how much we’ve grown in the last 10 years, it’s going to be a really special event this year. … Last year we saw close to 55,000 (people) and we’re expecting more this year. We’ll probably be closer to 65,000.”
This year’s lineup of celebrity guests includes fun for fans of “The Lord of the Rings.”
“We have Elijah Wood, Andy Serkis and Sean Astin all together,” Dabb said. “This is a really cool grouping because I don’t think they’ve ever been together before. … The three of them together has not happened before, at least in the United States at a comic con.”
There’s also some familiar faces from “Star Wars.”
“We’ve actually got some really great ‘Star Wars’ guests,” Dabb said. “We’ve got Billy Dee Williams, we’ve got Mike Quinn and David Barclay. Then from ‘The Clone Wars’ we’ve got Ashley Eckstein, Matt Lanter and James Arnold Taylor, so two kind of different ‘Star Wars’ worlds there, but a really cool lineup.”
Fans of “Doctor Who” also won’t be disappointed.
“We have quite the ‘Doctor Who’ lineup,” Dabb said. “We have Jodie Whittaker and Mandip Gill. We also have Chris Eccleston and Billie Piper and we have Karen Gillan, so quite a lot of guests for ‘Doctor Who’ fans, and then of course Karen has the crossover into ‘Guardians of the Galaxy,’ so super excited about that lineup.”
Other famous guests include “Star Trek” icon LeVar Burton, “Power Rangers” star Amy Jo Johnson, “Desperado” alum Danny Trejo, “Futurama” voice actor Phil LaMarr and 12 voice actors from “My Hero Academia.”
“Every guest we have they can get an autograph from the guest, a lot of them do selfies, and then you can do an official photo op with all of the guests as well,” Dabb said.
Listen to our full conversation here.
