Nick Kroll, Jason Mantzoukas & Jessi Klein – Big Mouth – New York Comic Con 2019

By starrymag | October 30, 2019

By: Ashlee Dell’Arciprete

 

 

Q) First, congrats on being renewed through a sixth season. How do you go about determining how far to go in material?

 

Nick Kroll: Sure, we’ve been, you know, part of making the show to begin with was animating it and having adults voice the kids so that we could talk about much more mature content and get away with stuff. And I think we’re also incredibly conscious if we’re making a joke that steps towards the line, or over it, that we comment on it to make it very clear that we are aware of what we’re doing. And I think that that is helpful in allowing us to do more outlandish, crazy material.

 

Q) How did you originally come up with the idea for the show?

 

Nick Kroll: Andrew Goldberg and Mark Levin and Jen Flacket, who I co-created the show with, came to me with the idea of a show based on me and Andrew being in middle school. Andrew and I have been friends since first grade, and it immediately made sense. And, again, we started talking about the adults voicing kids, which I think allowed animation to be a central focus and then starting to think of stuff like the hormone monsters, felt like oh, this can be animated and can live there, and we sort of ran from there. It felt like puberty was something that literally everyone goes through and it’s a universal experience. All you’re hoping for, I think, is to create a show that is–that people can find a way in on and everybody’s experiences this thing. So, it hopefully would be able to have a broad audience.

 

Q) Will #MeToo be playing a part in any of the storylines this season?

 

Nick Kroll: Well, I think you know, in the case of Nick, who had Rick the hormone monster, the old man, and then and then got Tyler, then Connie, I think it speaks to what I think I felt a bit at that point and really throughout my life, which is that your hormones aren’t necessarily entirely masculine or feminine. I think really, this season was the first season we wrote after #MeToo took hold. So a lot of the season is the kids struggling with living in a post-#MeToo world where women and girls are are fed up and angry, and men are trying to understand how to deal with their masculinity. Nick, I think, finds himself somewhere in between because he has a female hormone monster that he is trying to navigate where he fits inside of all that.

 

Q) How did the collaboration with the cast of “Queer Eye” come about?

 

Nick Kroll: We had the idea–we were all watching “Queer Eye” and we just love the show. And we thought that coach Steve would be a funny person to “Queer Eye” because underneath he…I like to describe him as “a melon with a mustache.” But underneath, we always feel like there might be like a good-looking guy underneath all that. So, we just really approached them. I had met them all a bunch at Netflix events and knew them a bit casually. And we went through Netflix and went to the show and they were immediately on board. Trying to coordinate their schedule in between while they were shooting seasons took a little bit of work, but they were down and they were great. It was just a show that we all loved watching. So, we gave it a shot and they were down. It was great.

 

Q) What can you tease about the musical episode?

 

Nick Kroll: Yeah, we did an episode where the kids put on a musical of the movie Disclosure, the 90s movie. It came up, we wanted to do a musical–a kid’s musical episode. We thought what would it be a funny object for it? And I was like, “Well, the bad example would be like Disclosure,” and then it kind of stuck. And I think we kept trying to find another project, but it worked well because Disclosure is this story about women, sexual harassment and really white upper middle-class male paranoia. And it was made twenty-five years ago. So, it’s a real 90s kind of movie and so it ended up being kind of a perfect movie to talk about our way into talking about sexual harassment and the conversation that the country and the world has been having around that area and then we talked about it how to-

 

Jason Mantzoukas: Yeah, the podcast which I’m one of the hosts of, we did an episode dedicated to the movie Disclosure that allowed us to talk about it and then also talk about the episode “Big Mouth.”

 

Q) How do you come up with the character design? 

 

Nick Kroll: Jesse draws them all. [laughs]

 

Jessi Klein: I draw them all. [laughs] I have them all already drawn, so then Nick just tell me which ones he needs.

 

Nick Kroll: We have an incredible character design team and animators. I’m trying to think, we in-general character design as much as possible we try to. When we cast someone we try to use that person, like The Shame Wizard we had been working on the design for it when we got David Thewlis to voice The Shame Wizard. We then sent our designers pictures of David to then go back in and add some of the details of it. We did the same with a lot of the– Ali Wong’s character for example and we cast Ali, she really feels like Ali there’s something about giving a real reference to people that add some weird specificity to the humanity of the characters. Like Mona for example, who is Mrs. Hormone Monstress who will be new this season. We got Tandy Newton to play Mona. And that is more like we were driving took a while to find her design as we took a while to cast and figure out who Mona was. And we landed on her being kind of like a fun London party girl. So, when you see the final design she’s sort of in the Connie family of a Hormone Monsters, but she’s got things in like…We realized like Connie’s hair is a very active part of her character. Mona’s got shorter hair and we slowly as we went along and developed and saw Mona come to life. We then realized like her tail could be something that would be an extra flourish to just add personality to the character. So we’re always trying to find those things and once we create some sort of element to it we try to find the flourishes

 

Q) Is there ever a cap of how explicit you guys can go, or are you pretty much given full control?

 

Nick Kroll: I mean, I remember on my birthday last year there’s an episode where we go back to Duke Ellington, where Duke tells the boys about his puberty and how he lost his virginity and discovered ragtime music. And there’s a thing in it where Maury Young…Maury offers this guy, Archdick Ferdinand, and it’s the Archduke Ferdinand and we impetus for World War 1. Yes, yes. So, something like that we come up with that came we came up with on my birthday. And you’ll see the episode. It’s insane. It’s a tangent with inside the episode. And I just had this moment where I was like, I can’t believe this is my job. Like, I really had a moment where it’s like, “This is my birthday.” I couldn’t ask for a better gift then saying “Archduke Ferdinand” and knowing that within a couple weeks there would be a tiny World War 1 German Duke drawn with a funny little mustache. So, no, it really there is no limit. And it’s that what is the most fun thing about animation and, specifically, our show that any flight of fancy can immediately become a reality. And there’s just no limits, no production limits or anything.

 

Q) How much of the show is improved versus on script?

 

Nick Kroll: Well, I’ll just I’ll say something, then let them speak. We do as many drafts and polishes as we can. And then we get the scripts in front of Jason and Jessi in the rest of our cast. And there’s some of the funniest improvisers and comedic minds working and we tried to suck as much of them out of it as possible.

 

Jason Mantzoukas: I’d say one of the best recurring comedy shows in LA is the “Big Mouth” table read that happens Tuesdays when we’re in season. It’s the funniest script read by some of the funniest people in town. And they’ve done a great job writing, but then for us it’s about getting in the booth, preferably together as much as possible because there are opportunities. We’ve all known each other for decades. We’ve all come up with improv backgrounds, that kind of stuff. So, there is an element of playfulness that allows for discoveries in the room that can then turn into recurring bits throughout or can just be one-off tangents and whatever. But it makes it the fact that we record together a-typically from a lot of the other animation I’ve done. The fact that we do record together has that sense, adds that sense of discovery, and that feeling that moment to moment; anything can happen that I feel like translates to the show quite well.

 

Jessi Klein: Yeah, I would just repeat all of those things, essentially. And, I mean, I would just add…I actually don’t come from an improv background, really. I did stand up. But regardless, the show is so good. But even if it was bad, [Laughs], which it’s not bad for me, it is so fun to get to be in the booth with people like Nick and Jason just doing scenes where I am like getting to play in this way that I never did before. And it truly there are moments where I cannot. I almost can’t breathe. It’s so funny.

 

Jason Mantzoukas: Yeah, we always laugh.

 

Jessi Klein: Yeah.

 

Jason Mantzoukas: Everybody wants to know, like, “Are you afraid you’re gonna laugh?” We just do laugh. Yeah, all the time.

 

Nick Kroll: That’s the beauty of animation is you just reset, start again. [Jason: Yeah, exactly.] But I would also just add that as dirty and, hopefully funny, as the show is, we’re all trying to infuse it with as much sentiment and heartwarming as possible. And I believe recording that stuff together is as useful as the improvising that we do. Because to be able to act with Jason or Jessi or my, you know, or, John Mulaney or Jenny Slate or whoever I’m working with. There’s a humanity that’s infused when you’re acting opposite someone versus just doing your lines alone in a booth. And so I find the collaborative process of the more dramatic stuff to be as important to be able to work with other people.

 

Q) Actually, speaking to that, when you guys started the show did you have any idea of the impact that might have given that kids can find it on Netflix and see some of the awkward and uncomfortable parts of growing up that they may be able to find comfort in? 

 

Nick Kroll: I think we really thought it was a fruitful area for a show because puberty felt like something that everyone’s gone through and that the stakes were so high. But we really made the show for us. And the fact that kids have gravitated to the show and taken to it is incredibly gratifying. And the idea that a kid who might feel alone or alienated or confused or embarrassed about what’s happening to them. The idea that they would watch the show and maybe feel less. So, in any of those ways is, to me, incredibly gratifying. I had a friend come up to me and say, “I love the show. I’m watching it.” It’s great, very complimentary. And then he said, “And I’ve discovered that my oldest is also watching it without me knowing it.” That at first made me nervous, but then it has precipitated a number of conversations between us that I would never have brought up [and] that she would never have brought up. But because we had both shared this, the show, we could talk about the episode of the show and how it dealt to the thing. That, to me, is pretty remarkable that singular individual experiences can be bringing together parents and children that have conversations that both might have been too embarrassed to start on their own.

 

Q) Are those some of the conversations that happen in the writers room too and where ideas for stories get thought of?

 

Nick Kroll: It’s a combination of things. I think season by season we get together in our room. We’ve been lucky to maintain a lot of the original writers and we bring in new people every year and trying to bring in different voices to speak to different versions of what different kids’ adolescent experiences are. And then we have ten-poll ideas that we’re interested in both storylines. Like this season there’s like Nick is obsessed with his phone because we wanted to talk about what it’s like for kids right now and their relationship to their phones and how different it was it is for them than what it was like for us. But we also want to talk about like, female girls experience with sexuality and experiences.

 

Jessi Klein: I didn’t know anything about it. [Laughs] But the writers wrote it for me and I read it. [Laughs]

 

Nick Kroll: And so we have elements like that, where we have started to explore Jay’s bisexuality and we want to explore that more. Then, within that, we really just are working on frameworks for a season at a time. We’re not really thinking, one, we hadn’t been picked up for three seasons. But two, we want to both have a long vision, but also pay respect to the idea that these kids are figuring this stuff out and letting the characters like tell us what they want to be. Like Jay’s sexuality, for example, we didn’t start out the show being like, “Oh, this kid is going to be–

 

Jason Mantzoukas: In season three, he’ll you know…

 

Nick Kroll: Yeah, we just were like…We just knew he was a sexual kid who liked having sex with his pillow. But as we started to write to him, we realized like, “Oh, maybe this kid is trying to struggling through this.”

 

Jason Mantzoukas: That’s what’s great about the show is that things within earlier seasons can kind of flourish into other storylines or as these kids grow and age and as everybody does confront all of this stuff to show allows for it well never compromising what’s funny, or never betraying any of the kids with inherent games or emotional feelings or anything like that.

 

Nick Kroll: Yes. And I think like, for example, Jay has these older siblings, it’s a mess of a house. But we sort of played with that in first season three you see Jay, kind of basically being abandoned and moving into Nick’s house. Because I think all of us in the writers room knew a kid or were the kid that had to go stay at someone else’s house. And middle school is around that time, where it’s like, hey, Jay is going to be staying with us for a little while. And there’s a lot of comedy there. But there’s a lot of pathos there. And a lot of truth that I think people can understand that that period of life that that happens. And like, we didn’t know that was going to happen, but it’s felt like it was discovered.

 

Jason Mantzoukas: I mean, look at that house. [Laughs] Jay, Jay is really in it.

 

Nick Kroll: Yeah.

 

Q) You guys have a really interesting way about putting together your stories for the episode and then the overall season. They’re very serious tones that run throughout, but also you have a very explicit sense of humor. So, how do you find that balance in the episodes? How do you make sure that joke doesn’t go too far to compromise what the actual meaning is? For example, how you were talking about how you had a friend who came up and talk to you about it, do you think that they would have had a different reaction if you went a little further with a joke? 

 

Jason Mantzoukas: I think the writers and producers and everybody do an amazing job and have built a foundation of not just really funny characters who are just mix them up. And they’re going to be funny any which way, but like developing genuine, deep, emotional lives for these kids to have both and not just the kids, the adults as well. I feel like in exploring the world, in building out from just the kids, you’ve gotten to know the divorces. You’ve gotten to know the parents’ lives as well.  Bringing an emotional depth to bring them alive was for both to be examined without selling either out, without compromising the emotional storylines for jokes and without the emotional storylines, making the jokes feel like they shouldn’t be there. I think it’s a delicate balance, but one that they’ve done a masterful job for us to come in and be given an episode where I’m both very emotionally distraught–because I’ve been like ‘Home Alone-ed’ by my parents–but then also be able to make deeply funny dirty jokes and have both be possible because they are the expression of this kids careening in and insecurities. I think that’s kind of great that it’s not just one or the other.

 

Q) Being that you have been renewed until season six, have you thought about the timeline as far as their age? 

 

Nick Kroll: We’re aging the look. A show about puberty feels like it owes the evolution in that we see the kids change. We’re also doing it. The joy is that we don’t have to like do it too fast, like when you’re other coming of age shows where the kids just physically mature. So, we’re kind of slowly aging them. I mean, I assume as we age them, we will continue to have those kids deal with the realities of what feels age appropriate.

 

Jason Mantzoukas: But they’re not like other animated characters who are frozen in time.

 

Nick Kroll: Correct. You know, they’re not–

 

Jason Mantzoukas: Bart Simpson. Like these kids are already older than they were in season one.

 

Nick Kroll: Yeah

 

Jason Mantzoukas: You know, but they’re not. I don’t think season five they’re going to be juniors in college.

 

Nick Kroll: Correct.

 

Q) You must have a lot of storylines that you haven’t told yet. Are you able to share any of those that you’re planning to do soon or maybe haven’t figured out how to yet?

 

Nick Kroll: Yeah, I mean, we have tons of stories that we’re still kind of trying to tell. Like we haven’t–it seems so simple–but we haven’t told a good acne story yet. Like, we haven’t figured our way into that like hygiene stuff, which I think kids are trying to figure out. Or hair. Like things like all types and versions of hair. So, like their stories like that – that we haven’t quite figured out. But we’re slowly…The beauty is like…There seems to be no end to the amount of stories in adolescence and puberty to tell. And I think we’re patiently trying to…make our way through them.

 

Q) Does the series have any particular setting?

 

Nick Kroll: Well, Andrew and I grew up in Westchester. I grew up in Rye and Andrew grew up in White Plains. And, so, it just felt like that was our experience. So, it felt like a decent place to set it and felt like suburbs and it was the easiest place for us to speak honestly to what our experience was like.

 

Q) Do you ever look back at maybe old diaries or journals you kept to draw from?

 

Nick Kroll: [To Jessi:] I mean, I feel like you have journals.

 

Jessi Klein: Sadly, I have. Like I started keeping a little diary I think when I was eight years old and I still have it. It went through maybe junior high and reading it is the most excruciating horrendous thing to read.

 

Jason Mantzoukas: Would you read to us now from it? [Laughs]

 

Jessi Klein: [Laughs] No, no. It’s just so vividly horrifying in terms of…like anytime I move I find it in a box and I reread it. But it’s just how earnest–how earnestly everything was felt and that everything felt so big. But, also, there was no irony or sarcasm. Like in the experience, there was no other perspective when you’re that age other than just being in it. And I have to say, like reading scripts, the writers are so good. There are things that are in there that I haven’t thought about in a long time. Then, all of a sudden, I’m reading an episode and something very vividly comes back to me. I mean, a lot of stuff about periods, getting your period and the awkwardness around that. And–

 

Nick Kroll: I write all of that stuff. [Laughs]

 

Jessi Klein: [Sarcastically] That stuff they don’t want women, don’t trust having women, right? Yeah. And Nick really has a handle on it. [Jokes] It’s one of the things that’s fun about the show is getting to be reminded of those moments in life that you’ve either forgotten or purposely blocked out.

 

Nick Kroll: I didn’t keep journals, at all, but I think what I find, ironically, is that the stuff that I’m talking about in therapy…So much of the stuff that I’m talking about in therapy is stuff that started or manifested itself in a period of time of adolescence. So, the show is this incredibly weird kind of therapeutic back and forth of me talking about what I’m going through now and how what happened to me at that age affected that. And then bringing that into the [writers] room and having that come into the room and then using some of the things that come up in episodes as a means to try to understand what it is I’m going through now.

 

Q) If you’re able to share, perhaps in the next few episodes, are there any characters that we haven’t really focused on yet that are going to be moving to the foreground to  

 

Nick Kroll: So, a character like Matthew, voiced by Andrew Rannells, started the show as sort of our like sassy, gay kid. He continues to be incredibly funny and sassy, but we’re really interested in digging in more with him and understanding and talking to that experience in a real way. That’s exciting. I mean, it’s all sort of a jumble in my head, but, that that’s kind of interesting. And Ali [Wong]’s character (although [she] hasn’t been introduced yet) is introduced as a major part and new character.

 

Q) What is your dream guest star or someone who you’ve been trying to get to come be a part of an episode for a while?

 

Nick Kroll: Well, I’ve tried to we try to get Howard Stern to be Nick’s hormone monster up in the department of puberty. I wrote a letter to his agent. He politely declined [Laughter]. Because I think he’d be he’d be pretty good hormone monster.

 

Jason Mantzoukas: As a fan of Howard Stern, I think he would love this show, as well, because he talks so much about his life during this era of time for him and how important it is to the person he is now. I think he would really be into it.

 

Nick Kroll: I think he actually at one point mentioned it, but it’s also because Ronnie, the limo driver, is a hormone monster. [Laughter] I mean, he truly is. But we’ve been incredibly lucky that the people we’ve gone out to have largely said yes to doing the show. And we’ve been blessed with, I think, the most talented voice cast in animation. Very grateful for that.

 

Q) I love the references the show makes to New York, but it also seems like the show can be universal in terms of where viewers are from. Was the idea for New York just because of where you and the other creators are from? 

 

Nick Kroll: I think the references to the New York area are just…It’s where I grew up. Jessi grew up in the city and we bonded years and years ago about both being Mets fans growing up and I just think it’s–I mean, Coach Steve, for example is such a New York character. It is a New York show. We’re pulling from our little pop culture Rolodex. We all have different ones and you’re pulling out like a card. So, a lot of them end up being that to New York area specifics, but I think there is universality and specificity. I think if a show takes place in New York, you make a lot of New York references. But people in Canada and Mexico and Idaho will appreciate it even if they don’t even understand, specifically, the reference they understand.

 

Jessi Klein: It’s how lived in the characters are. Pulling in those little things really make you feel like you are watching a fully three dimensional wholly-lived character.

 

Nick Kroll: Yeah, who happened to be cartoon.

 

Jessi Klein: And, also, let’s go Met’s. [Laughs]