Latest news with #WTFWithMarcMaron
Yahoo
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Marc Maron on ‘The Bad Guys 2,' His Reaction to Colbert's ‘Late Show' Being Canceled and Why Barack Obama Is His Dream Pick for Final ‘WTF' Guest
Marc Maron says his dream guest for his final episode of 'WTF With Marc Maron' would be Barack Obama. The former president appeared on a previous episode of Maron's show back in June 2015. More from Variety 'The Bad Guys 2' Review: Sam Rockwell's Mr. Wolf Leads His Fellow Animal Scoundrels in a Benignly Rambunctious Follow-Up 'Smoke' Star Jurnee Smollett on Her 'Flawed' Detective Character in Apple TV+ Series: 'I'm Not Interested in Just Playing the Strong, Badass Woman' Allison Janney on 'West Wing' Reunion With 'Hilarious' Bradley Whitford for 'The Diplomat' Season 3: 'He Keeps Everyone Happy on Set' 'If we could get President Obama back, that would be good to give us a little hope or some sense of reflection,' he told Variety Wednesday at the premiere of his new animated movie 'The Bad Guys 2' in Los Angeles. 'Ground us a little bit.' In June, Maron made headlines when he and producer Brendan McDonald decided to end the podcast that launched in 2009. Maron made the announcement in an episode with John Mulaney as his guest. After recording more than 1,600 episodes, Maron said that the podcast will air its final episode in the fall. Coming off the heels of announcing the end of his podcast, Maron shared his reaction to the report on CBS cancelling the 'Late Show With Stephen Colbert.' 'The timing was bad,' he said. 'It seems that there was a political element, at least in appearance. To a certain degree, the message is that if corporations are going to buckle to the whims of an autocrat, an authoritarian, then all of art and what we know as freedom of expression is compromised. The writing is on the wall for late-night in general because people don't watch TV like that. I felt like a mixture of both. I don't think it's a complete fabrication that it was a business decision, but the other part of it, in terms of trying to appease this monster president, that should not be done.' When asked about how new mediums and digital platforms will shape the future of TV, Maron admitted that he was unsure of what's next. 'Show business is shrinking,' he said. 'People are entrepreneurial and building their own show businesses that eventually get appropriated and used by what's left of mainstream show business and streamers. Hopefully, enough interest and focus will be put on original productions, film and television. You have to hope for the best, or everything just turns to garbage.' In 'The Bad Guys 2,' Maron reprised his role as expert safecracker Mr. Snake. After struggling to find jobs as ex-convicts and framed for a crime they didn't commit, the Bad Guys are forced to complete another heist with newcomers, the Bad Girls. In the Bad Girls trio is a wry raven named Doom (aka Susan), whom Mr. Snake falls smitten for, and is voiced by Natasha Lyonne. 'She has no problem being flirty, seductive and uniquely sexy,' Maron said about working with Lyonne. 'I opened up to it and became jello. That was good for Mr. Snake. It worked that we were able to spend so much time in the studio together.' Rounding out the cast are Sam Rockwell (Mr. Wolf), Craig Robinson (Mr. Shark), Anthony Ramos (Mr. Piranha), Awkwafina (Ms. Tarantula), Alex Borstein (The Police Commissioner), Danielle Brooks (Kitty Kat) and Maria Bakalova (Pigtail). According to Maron, Mr. Snake and Doom's romantic trope was almost buried underneath the other plots present in the film. 'Originally, the romance got lost in the chaos of the ending with everything else going on,' he explained. 'When I saw an early cut, I told them, 'You started this thing. You should land it.' They realized it was an oversight, and they closed the circle.' Maron said having an off-screen friendship with Lyonne created 'a safe space' for building the chemistry between their characters. 'We let it happen,' he said. 'We know each other well enough to let that happen in a safe space. We pushed it. It was interesting because she takes me for a ride, which I think would be seen as a betrayal by some, but Mr. Snake was impressed with it. I liked playing that a little bit.' Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts? Final Emmy Predictions: Talk Series and Scripted Variety - New Blood Looks to Tackle Late Night Staples Solve the daily Crossword
Atlantic
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Culture Changed. Marc Maron Stayed the Same.
Back in the 1990s, when Marc Maron began appearing on Late Night With Conan O'Brien as a panel guest, the comedian would often alienate the crowd. Like most of America at the time, O'Brien's audience was unfamiliar with Maron's confrontational brand of comedy and his assertive, opinionated energy. (In 1995, the same year he taped an episode of the HBO Comedy Half-Hour stand-up series, Maron was described as 'so candid that a lot of people on the business side of comedy think he's a jerk' in a New York magazine profile of the alt-comedy scene.) But through sheer will, he would eventually win them back. 'You always did this thing where you would dig yourself into a hole and then come out of it and shoot out of it like this geyser,' O'Brien recently told Maron. 'It was a roller-coaster ride in the classic sense.' Maron, though, was rarely attempting to sour the room. 'I went out there wanting that first joke to work every time! It just did not,' he told O'Brien. Even when he eventually achieved some mainstream success through his long-running podcast, WTF With Marc Maron, Maron's comedy remained an acquired taste, equal parts cantankerous and ruminative. Still, he reached that success by maintaining his creative voice, not by compromising it. It's an approach partially born out of necessity, he acknowledges in Panicked, his new HBO Max special: 'I don't know if all I'm doing is mining for gold in a river of panic.' Panicked is the third special from Maron this decade, following 2020's End Times Fun and 2023's From Bleak to Dark. In this loose trilogy, the comedian contends with catastrophic current events—climate emergencies, COVID, the gradual rise of authoritarianism—while addressing difficulties in his personal life. These specials feature Maron at his most controlled: He delivers long-form cinematic narratives while dipping into character work (affecting voices, embodying personas) and experimenting with physical comedy. One recurring subject in Panicked is, for lack of a better term, all varieties of shittiness: Maron talks about his cat Charlie's diarrhea troubles and the discovery of rat feces in his crawl space, which eventually prompts an existential spiral about why his home has seemingly become a rest-stop bathroom for the neighborhood rodents. The theme—this feeling of being surrounded by the muck—extends beyond the purely domestic. As he sees it, America has declined under fascistic leadership; democracy itself has nose-dived in part because of comedians who are overly obsessed with censorship; Maron's father's mind is slowly decaying because of his dementia. In one digression, Maron muses about various possibilities for his own corpse once he dies: a cemetery burial where no one will visit him; a cremation where his ashes will be possibly mixed into his cat's food; an environmentally friendly burial in a forest that will one day be developed into housing. Some of these seem like terrible options for the afterlife, frankly—and while this riffing is funny, it's also unavoidably dark. 'I don't think that I ever got into this to be entertaining,' Maron tells his audience. It's an instructive, revealing sentiment he's conveyed many times before, especially on WTF, which he recently announced will end this fall. Even when Maron was a younger, more aggressive comic, his jokes were always a vehicle for recursive self-reflection. He held people's attention by exposing his psyche and excavating humor from the act of emotional vulnerability. At the same time, Maron's work has never been about personal confession for its own sake. Consider a lengthy bit from Panicked during which he recalls sexual trauma he may have experienced as a child. When Maron and his brother were younger, he explains, they had an older male babysitter who asked them to sexually service him. Maron isn't certain whether he complied (though he admits that it's distinctly possible), but he proceeds to itemize other childhood traumas, such as being shamed for his weight by his mother, that he considers 'much worse than blowing the babysitter.' Maron begins the bit by insisting that he's processed the experience; the story isn't meant to solicit pity or serve as the basis for a TED Talk–like speech about how to overcome hardship. Instead, it's a springboard to explore how people in his orbit worked through the abuse that they've inflicted on others. He digs into what he describes as his mother's neglectful parenting; he reimagines his old babysitter as a current-day 'anti-woke' comedian who brags about his sadistic exploits. Anguish is redirected into forceful speculation, all without sacrificing the laughs. Since WTF premiered in 2009, Maron's temperament has certainly softened. But his perspective, and the way he manages his emotions, have remained remarkably consistent from the jump. Consider the gap in personal circumstance between Panicked and 2009's Final Engagement, his third comedy album and some of the most bitter stand-up I've ever heard. Though Final Engagement was recorded at a personal low and Panicked arguably at a professional peak, he's recognizably the same person in both works. His subjects and their contexts may change, but Maron's style—his cheeky and dyspeptic delivery, his wound-up body language, the way he can use a stool as rhetorical punctuation—has been constant, a sign not of stagnation but of truth. While it's possible to divide Maron's career into phases—not famous and then sort-of famous, grumpy and less grumpy—it's better to view his body of work as a continuum. In End Times Fun, he directed outrage toward the normalization of California's worsening wildfire seasons; by Panicked, the normalization has set in, and he tells a story about needlessly evacuating his home during the fires that swept through Southern California earlier this year. Similarly, the rage he expressed in his following album, 2006's Tickets Still Available, about George W. Bush using the potential capture of Osama bin Laden as an electoral strategy, is not dissimilar from his incredulous anger in Panicked regarding voters eager to say retarded without reprisal. If Maron's perspective has changed, it's in relation to evolving cultural norms. In Panicked, Maron describes his phone as his 'primary emotional partner' with sarcastic resignation, a stance that amasses some historical weight given that, in 2002, he closed his first album by mocking the frenzied dread of a person who had forgotten their cellphone. He's also surrendered some ground on his long-standing discomfort with psychiatric medication now that he takes an anti-anxiety pill. ('Just to report in, it's not working,' he deadpans.) But personal growth is neither a straight line nor a total transformation; sometimes it happens by remaining present and real in a world that offers little solid footing. The pleasure of Maron's stand-up is witnessing him use his voice to continually revise thoughts amidst shifting winds—not a conventional sort of entertainment, but a style that still counts for something.
Epoch Times
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Epoch Times
Marc Maron Calls Time on His Long-Running Podcast Show
Actor and comedian Marc Maron, best known for his popular podcast, 'WTF With Marc Maron,' is bringing his show to a close after nearly 16 years. The 61-year-old made the announcement during a June 2
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Alex Cooper Offers Intimate Look At How She Grew ‘Call Her Daddy' Podcast Into A Media Empire In ‘Call Her Alex' Trailer
Alex Cooper is pulling back the curtain on how she grew her Call Her Daddy podcast into a multimillion-dollar media empire in her upcoming docuseries Call Her Alex. Hulu released a trailer for the two-part series Tuesday. In it, Cooper explains how her upbringing inspired an entrepreneurial spirit that she took with her into adulthood. Watch the trailer above. More from Deadline 2025 Premiere Dates For New & Returning Series On Broadcast, Cable & Streaming 'WTF With Marc Maron' To End After Over 15 Years 'Love Island UK' Season 12 Gets U.S. Premiere Date On Hulu 'I was fortunate to grow up in a household where it was normalized to speak your mind,' she says. 'Playing sports and making videos in my basement, those were the two things I really loved.' When an accident takes Division I soccer away from her, she finds herself driven to find her new purpose, ultimately resulting in her hit podcast Call Her Daddy. The trailer teases details the podcast's early days at Barstool and Cooper's six-year journey to where she is today. RELATED: Cooper has had huge success in the podcasting space. She initially launched the advice and comedy posdcast Call Her Daddy in 2018, alongside her then co-host Sofia Franklyn, with Barstool Sports before signing a huge deal, thought to be worth around $60M, with Spotify in 2021. The podcast exploded and became second only to The Joe Rogan Experience in the podcast charts, before she moved to SiriusXM last year in a deal valued around $120M. Call Her Alex will launch on June 10 following its June 8 debut at Tribeca Festival. [youtube Best of Deadline 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More Everything We Know About 'Nobody Wants This' Season 2 So Far List Of Hollywood & Media Layoffs From Paramount To Warner Bros Discovery To CNN & More
Los Angeles Times
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Marc Maron will wind down his ‘WTF' podcast after a pioneering run of nearly 16 years
Comic Marc Maron is done. Well, almost done with his famous podcast. 'WTF With Marc Maron' will come to a close this fall, he announced Monday. 'We're tired, people. Burnt out,' he wrote on his website, explaining that he and producer Brendan McDonald had an agreement that they would end the pod's run when either or both of them were 'ready to stop.' Both are now ready, he said. 'As of September we will have been doing the show for 16 years. Wow. That's a long time to do anything,' Maron wrote. 'We have put a new show out twice a week for 16 years and we've put everything we have into those shows. That's just the way we work. We have since the beginning and it's always been just us. Obviously, we had help along the way, but in terms of creating the show Brendan does his job, I do mine. No networks, no boss. Just us and hundreds of guests and you.' 'WTF' was named best comedy podcast by the Academy of Podcasters in 2016 and was nominated for the iHeart Radio Podcast Awards in 2019. The operation began in September 2009, and while it wasn't the first podcast ever, Maron said that 'in terms of making it a viable medium, we were certainly one of the OGs.' There was no way to make money from it at first, he said on Monday's pod. He and McDonald just knew they were going to do two shows a week. 'We changed the world, literally. ... We helped unleash an exciting type of delivery system for pure self-expression,' Maron wrote on his website. Maron told The Times in 2017 that he prepares for interviews by, for example, watching a director's film or listening to a musician's records but without much outside research. 'How do you get around someone's public narrative?' Maron asked The Times. 'People who live public lives have a public narrative. And they'll go to it, because it's easy. Sometimes you can get a little more within those narratives, but to get around it is really the trick.' That year, he and McDonald published 'Waiting for the Punch: Words to Live By From the WTF Podcast,' a collection of excerpts from interviews with guestsincluding former President Obama, Bruce Springsteen, Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer, Louis CK and Will Ferrell, to name a few. Maron credited the selections in the book to McDonald's 'steel trap memory' of who had said what and when. 'What winds up in the book are many of the unexpected or revealing conversational nuggets that could be discovered only after the familiar territory had been crossed,' then-Times staff writer Carolyn Kellogg wrote. Moving forward from this fall — Maron didn't give a specific end date for 'WTF' on either the podcast or his website — the 61-year-old said that post-podcast he will be doing stand-up, more acting and 'hopefully enjoying life a bit.' 'There's probably going to be some ups and downs with me, emotionally, around the reality of this,' he said on the podcast. 'But ... this is a full-hearted decision, it's the right decision for Brendan, it's the right decision for me. It's OK for things to end. It's just time, folks.' Then he launched into an interview with comic John Mulaney.
