Latest news with #NickKroll
New York Post
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Nick Kroll reveals devastating details about John Mulaney's ‘brutal' intervention: ‘Scared' he was going to die
Nick Kroll helped save John Mulaney's life. The 'Big Mouth' star, 46, appeared on the new episode of Dax Shepard's 'Armchair Expert' podcast and opened up about staging a drug intervention for Mulaney, 42, in 2020. 'It was so scary and brutal to go through,' said Kroll. 'He was in New York. I was in LA. It was at the height of the pandemic. So it was incredibly, literally, stressful to be in the midst of that, trying to literally coordinate and produce an intervention, bringing a bunch of people together, friends from college.' Advertisement 7 Nick Kroll, John Mulaney at the 'John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's in L.A.' Netflix FYSEE Photo Call in June 2024. Variety via Getty Images Kroll recalled that Mulaney, his longtime friend and collaborator, 'was running around New York City like a true madman' at the time. 'And I was so deeply scared that he was gonna die,' he added. Advertisement 7 Nick Kroll on 'Armchair Expert.' Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard/Youtube The comedian explained that he 'orchestrated' the planning of the intervention which was 'f—ing stressful.' Kroll also said that the process gave him new insight into the pair's friendship. 'All of a sudden, you're going back, being like, 'Oh, oh, oh — that's why I've had an inconsistent friend for the last X amount of time. Oh, this explains that,'' Kroll shared. 'And so, it gives you both empathy for them, and also a tremendous amount of anger because they've been lying to you.' 7 John Mulaney and Nick Kroll attend the afterparty for 'Oh, Hello On Broadway' in 2016. Getty Images Advertisement 7 Nick Kroll and John Mulaney attend the Michael Che and Colin Jost's Emmys After Party in 2018. Getty Images for Google Recalling an emotional conversation he had with Mulaney days before the intervention, Kroll said, 'I just sat on the ground, on the phone with him, both of us crying. I said, 'I'm so scared you're going to die.' And I could feel him feeling the same way, but also like — 'Yeah, yeah, yeah…anyway, I gotta go. I'm at a new Airbnb.'' Mulaney believed he was going to a college friend's dinner when the intervention took place in New York City. Some of his closest friends were there, including Kroll and Seth Meyers. 'When he came out of rehab and started doing standup all about it, he was still pretty f—ing pissed about the intervention cause he was having a good time,' Kroll recalled. 'So he was pretty angry.' Advertisement 7 Nick Kroll and John Mulaney at the 33rd Film Independent Spirit Awards. Penske Media via Getty Images The 'Saturday Night Live' alum went to rehab for his addiction to cocaine and prescription pills for two months in December 2020. He poked fun at the experience in his 2023 Netflix special, 'John Mulaney: Baby J,' which didn't sit well with Kroll. 'All of a sudden, I was like, 'Oh, I don't know if I like having jokes about me,'' said Kroll. 'But then we talked about it and I was like, 'I don't like how you're representing this,' and he was like, 'I hear you. I totally hear you.'' 7 Nick Kroll and John Mulaney at the Keep It Clean To Benefit Waterkeeper Alliance in March 2018. Getty Images for Waterkeeper All 'And everyone's process and art is different,' Kroll noted. 'So what he's willing to share is what makes him so f—ing funny and dynamic and intoxicating as a performer. He's giving you a written version of his life, but he's giving you access to elements of himself. But it's what makes him such an amazing standup.' Mulaney has been sober since leaving rehab. He married actress Olivia Munn in July 2024 and they have two children together, son Malcolm, 3, and daughter Méi, 8 months. 7 John Mulaney and Olivia Munn at the 2025 Vanity Fair Oscar Party. WireImage Munn, 44, told GQ last year that she staged her own mini-intervention for Mulaney before he went to rehab. Advertisement The 'Your Friends and Neighbors' actress also shared that she still randomly drug tests Mulaney to help keep him sober. 'It's like a relief,' Mulaney said in the GQ interview. 'I like to be able to not even have that be a question in her or anyone else's mind. Something about peeing in that cup is like, I'm walking this walk. It gives me confidence.'
CNN
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
Nick Kroll ‘produced' John Mulaney's intervention because he ‘was so deeply scared that he was gonna die'
Being the subject of an intervention is never easy, but Nick Kroll is letting it be known that organizing one is no walk in the park either. During a recent episode of the 'Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard' podcast, Shepard, who is a recovering addict, brought up to Kroll how much he loved John Mulaney's Netflix standup special in which the comedian talks about his 2020 stint in rehab. Shepard wondered if Kroll was at the intervention that led to Mulaney's stay. 'I produced that intervention,' Kroll said. The 'Big Mouth' creator and star said it was 'so scary and brutal' to go through given that it was the height of the pandemic, he was living in Los Angeles and Mulaney was in New York at the time. Kroll's wife was also pregnant and he was in the midst of filming the movie 'Don't Worry Darling.' 'John was running around New York City like a true madman,' Kroll recalled. 'And I was so deeply scared that he was gonna die.' There were complicated feelings and many details to attend to, Kroll said, including who the intervention expert would be and where Mulaney would go for treatment. 'You're all of a sudden going back, being like, 'Oh, oh, oh — that's why I've had an inconsistent friend for the last X amount of time. Oh, this explains that,'' Kroll said. 'And so, it gives you both empathy for them and also a tremendous amount of anger because they've been lying to you.' Mulaney has since gotten sober and married actress Olivia Munn with whom he shares two young children. CNN has reached out to representatives for Mulaney for comment.
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Big Mouth' Was Courageously Filthy ‘Til the End, but About So Much More Than Sex: TV Review
SPOILER ALERT: The following piece contains spoilers for the series finale of 'Big Mouth,' now streaming on Netflix. It may surprise you to learn that 'Big Mouth,' the Netflix animated series chronicling a group of teenagers' physical and emotional maturation, concludes its eight-season run without one of its protagonists having sex. Then again, one of many lessons 'Big Mouth' imparted to its viewership — some well past the travails of puberty, some just on their cusp — is that sex is an expansive idea. With Hormone Monsters, the show's signature metaphor and comic creation, as their Virgils, the characters of 'Big Mouth' have explored everything from oral sex to erotica to enough masturbation to make the entire premise a smirking play on 'coming of age' even without more conventional congress. But in the end, all the gleeful obscenity took a backseat to the story's true subject: the terrifying process of growing up. More from Variety Nick Kroll Reveals the 'Sick Little D-' Scene in 'Big Mouth' That Netflix Asked to Be Cut: 'It's the Grossest Thing' Netflix Orders Adult Animated Comedy 'Mating Season' From 'Big Mouth' Team What's Coming to Netflix in May 2025 'Big Mouth' ultimately aired for nearly a decade, an eternity in the streaming age; in fact, the show wraps its tenure as the longest-running scripted original on Netflix, beating out 'Grace and Frankie.' And yet the creative team — comedian Nick Kroll and his childhood friend Andrew Goldberg, working with married duo Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett — avoided the frozen quality that helps so many animated series, whose actors don't age on-screen, last for the long haul. On 'The Simpsons,' Springfield is a timeless bubble. But 'Big Mouth' is about the passage of time, and what it does to young bodies. (The theme song, Charles Bradley's 'Changes,' couldn't be more apt.) Its heroes progress and evolve, graduating middle school and moving along the proverbial bases. This dynamism makes their journey's end both more natural and more meaningful than its medium's typical stasis. Kroll and Goldberg loosely modeled the leads of 'Big Mouth,' Nick (Kroll) and Andrew (John Mulaney), after younger versions of themselves. Hormone Monsters Maury (Kroll, in one of several roles), Rick (Kroll again), Connie (Maya Rudolph) and Mona (Thandiwe Newton) are also drawn from real life, albeit indirectly. These creatures personify the uncontrollable urges and insatiable desires that come with the first stirrings of adolescence — the voice telling you to rub one out in the bathroom or, as Mona's charge Missy Foreman-Greenwald (Ayo Edebiri) does in Season 8, hump your robotics team's final project to death. The Hormone Monsters were soon joined by a full menagerie of metaphysical beings, from the Shame Wizard (David Thewlis) to the Depression Kitty (Jean Smart) to the Anxiety Mosquito (Maria Bamford). The interplay between the Monsters and their mentees nonetheless remained the core of the show; 'Human Resources,' a spinoff set entirely in the creatures' workplace, was canceled after two seasons. The thesis of 'Big Mouth' is neatly summarized by a song in its penultimate episode: 'There's no such thing as normal / We're each and all uniquely strange.' What could be treacly assurance á la 'Our Bodies, Ourselves' was instead reinforced with gleeful profanity, like when a Miss Frizzle-esque sex ed teacher voiced by Natasha Lyonne takes the class on a Magic School Bus tour of a penis. Yet the show's underlying sincerity never wavered. 'Big Mouth' was committed to destigmatizing the most shameful and embarrassing parts of getting used to a grown-up body, while still acknowledging the inherent humor. In modeling candor and acceptance, the series was also open to recognizing and correcting its own mistakes. The biracial Missy was originally voiced by Jenny Slate, who makes a cameo in the final season as a kindly pharmacist who explains you can't get pregnant from clothed dry-humping, before Edebiri took over the role in 2020, a casting change that was written into the show as a sign of Missy's increasing self-possession. For their final act of embracing adulthood, the 'Big Mouth' kids face their fears and walk into a blank, expanding void that represents the unknowable future. It's not a subtle way to illustrate the yawning abyss of infinite potential, but 'Big Mouth' never bothered with subtlety when lewdly inventive allegory would do. Over eight seasons, the now-15-year-olds have moved from reckoning with their first periods and erections to their initial attempts at healthy, communicative relationships. 'Big Mouth' leaves them, and us, with one final lesson: Once you have the confidence to embrace your own messy quirks, you're equipped to face whatever comes your way — pun somewhat intended. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
The Guardian
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Adults review – Friends for the TikTok generation sitcom is a try-hard misfire
Adults, FX's new twenty-something comedy implicitly pitched as the Friends or Girls for the TikTok and location-sharing generation, opens with a studiously replicated scene of codependent young adulthood: five friends tangled together on a New York subway, their belongings and in-group references strewn between each other. In barely a minute, the characters gab in the way you'd imagine adult-adults imagine young-adults speak, breezing through exposition, getting high, being broke and not having enough hot water to shower. This being New York, there's also a subway masturbator, which Issa (Amita Rao), the loudest and bawdiest of a loud and bawdy group, handles by over-engaging, attempting to out-masturbate the creep. 'Is this the world you want?!' she shouts, to the horror of everyone else on the train. To my horror, as well – there's a fine line between cringe comedy and just cringe, and Adults, created by ex-Tonight Show writers Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw and executive produced by coming-of-age comedian extraordinaire Nick Kroll, is often on the wrong side of it. The barnstormer of an entrance – cue a joke about the progress of feminism – succeeds in setting the tone for the rest of the series (or at least, the six of eight episodes made available to critics): aggressively profane, a little off-putting, onto something but overdone, altogether doing too much. The television equivalent of the friend champing at the bit for inside jokes – Overcompensating, one could say, to borrow the title of another recent twenty-something comedy, albeit one set at US college, that has a better handle on its tone of heightened hijinks and egocentrism during a formative time. Which is a shame, because the viewing public is starved for a good show about one's miserable and magical twenties in post-pandemic New York – or, believably for a group of genuinely broke post-grads, an hour-plus train ride away from Manhattan in outer Queens (as played by Toronto). The archetypically messy group living for free-ish in Samir's (Malik Elassal) childhood home inhabit a recognizable world of post-Covid precarity and interconnectedness. Samir is chronically unemployed and struggling to assert himself. (His parents are off on a post-retirement jaunt.) His childhood best friend Billie (Lucy Freyer), the go-getter of the group, works at a cartoonishly bad media company with no health insurance. Even Anton (Owen Thiele), the house's resident charismatic gay and admitted 'friend slut', doesn't know what his job is besides chiming in 'uh-huh' on Zoom (an update on the Friends bit about Chandler's job). Issa appears to have made a career on hijacking social justice protests for personal gain. Her boyfriend, Canadian transplant Paul Baker (Jack Innanen) – always Paul Baker, never just Paul — is the group's resident softboy, the enthusiastic golden retriever to the over-contrived scheme of the day, such as air-tagging a man as a potential solution to Anton's dry spell. Over 20-ish minute episodes – Adults at least keeps it short and snappy – the crew flail about in ways both relatable and obnoxious. The gags are always a notch or two above necessary, such as an over-emphasis on a lack of physical boundaries (don't you remember letting your best friend pee through your legs?) or Issa and Anton convincing themselves that they annoyed their therapist to the point of suicide. (Issa, in particular, is a too-grating parody of narcissism, as if Marnie Michaels had negative shame and was also a socialist.) The show hits all the expected bases – a go-around on sex-positive app Feeld, an inadvertent and exorbitant hospital bill, the phrase 'defund the police and all, but…' – and some unexpected ones, including guest turns from an admirably game Charlie Cox as Billie's former teacher/older paramour and Julia Fox as her bleached eyebrow self. From house rules to a disastrous attempt at a roast chicken dinner party, all of it tastes overcooked, invoking the classic paradox that the harder one tries to make things look natural, the more contrived it seems. It's not that Adults doesn't have its moments, particularly as the season goes on and distances itself from a turkey of an opener. The cast, a mix of stand-up comedians, internet personalities and screen actors, eventually settles into a more level-headed groove, with Elassal and Freyer in particular demonstrating some emotional texture to their characters. (Thiele gets the award for comic timing). The less the writers strain for ego-centric, no-boundaries twenty-something-ness, the better; the funniest long-running bit is a simple gag about the gang referencing movies they haven't seen. But these are too few and far between, and likely too late after the overkill of the first episode to win over its target audience, though if Adults shares one thing with today's young people, it's a formless, ambient sense of anxiety. Perhaps that will diffuse if the show is given time to grow, and these young adults learn what most twenty-somethings do: in the game of winning friends and influencing people, one needn't try so hard. Adults starts on FX and Hulu in the US on 28 May and Disney+ elsewhere on 29 May
Axios
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
New movies and shows this week on Netflix, Apple TV+ and Prime Video
Here's what's new on Netflix, Apple TV+, Prime Video, HBO Max and Hulu. What we're watching: The final season of "Big Mouth," a new star-studded adventure film and a docuseries about one of NASCAR's biggest icons. " Big Mouth" season eight available Friday on Netflix State of play: Nick Kroll's NSFW animated series comes to an end as the gang faces new challenges in high school like puberty, driving, and uncertain futures. What to try: Two seasons of the show's spinoff, " Human Resources," are available to stream. " Fountain of Youth" available Friday on Apple TV+ The intrigue: John Krasinski, Natalie Portman and Stanley Tucci star in this action-adventure film about two estranged siblings who reunite to find the mythological fountain of youth. " Earnhardt" available now on Prime Video The vibe: This four-part documentary is a deep dive into the life, career, and complex family dynamics of NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt with archival footage, home videos and interviews from his children, competitors and close friends. My thought bubble: If you like documentaries like "The Last Dance," you'll enjoy this. " Pee-wee as Himself" on HBO Max The late comedian Paul Reubens recounts his life story and the creation of Pee-wee Herman in this two-part documentary directed by Matt Wolf ("The Stroll"). Available Friday " Sneaky Links: Dating After Dark" on Netflix Netflix's newest dating experiment follows a group of singles and their casual flings to discover if they are meant to be with each other or someone else. Available now " Nine Perfect Strangers" season two on Hulu Nicole Kidman returns as the mysterious guru Masha Dmitrichenko who invites nine new strangers to a wellness retreat full of twists in the Austrian Alps. Available now " She The People" on Netflix Tyler Perry's comedy series follows a newly elected Mississippi Lieutenant Governor (played by Terri J. Vaughn) who realizes the job will involve a lot more than she expected. Available now " Jerrod Carmichael: Don't Be Gay" on HBO Max Carmichael dives into the dynamics of his relationship in his fourth HBO stand-up special. Available Saturday " Untold: The Fall of Favre" on Netflix This documentary examines the multiple off-the-field scandals of three-time NFL MVP Brett Favre. Available now " Motorheads" on Prime Video This drama series follows a pair of teen siblings trying to adjust to life in a new town and finding a way to bond over cars and street racing. Available now " Sirens" on Netflix Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon star in this dark comedy series that explores the mythology of sirens against the backdrop of women, family, power and class. Available now " Fear Street: Prom Queen" on Netflix This next installment of the "Fear Street" franchise is based on 1992's "The Prom Queen" by R.L. Stine. Available Friday " Air Force Elite: Thunderbirds" on Netflix
