Nick Kroll Made The Funniest Sex-Ed Video Of All Time With 'Big Mouth', His New Netflix Show

The new cartoon mirrors all the horrors that come with going through puberty.

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We've all been through it – puberty is a tumultuous time for the best of us. Luckily, we have Nick Kroll and Andrew Goldberg's new Netflix series Big Mouth to help us all finally find peace with a time we've hoped everyone else around us forgot. The show is a surreal cartoon series comprising ten episodes, each focused on a different aspect of the journey through puberty – and it's possibly the funniest animated series this side of Rick And Morty.

The semi-autobiographical story follows Nick (voiced by Kroll), Andrew (voiced by John Mulaney) and their circle of friends, as they navigate the nexus of awkwardness that tends to manifest in our teenage years. Complex AU spoke to one of the co-creators, Nick Kroll, all about the show, and which of the devastatingly embarrassing moments from it were actually pulled directly from his own life.

Tell us a little bit about your intentions with making a show like Big Mouth.

In a weird way it's like 30 years in the making, in that I became friends with my co-creator Andrew Goldberg, we met in first grade and have stayed friends ever since. And the idea was that, one, it's very autobiographical for me – it's really based on what we were both going through during that specific time in life, which is puberty. And it's such an emotion-filled high-stakes time in life that had never really been explored in animation the way we wanted to do it. And we just felt like there was so much material to draw on for us to–especially with animation– make a show that really spoke to our personal experiences and would hopefully be very universal. I think what I hoped people get out of the show is just how alone you feel at that time in your life but the reality is, we want kids to feel like they're not alone going through this and also give adults a chance to look back on that time in life. It feels like a pretty embarrassing time unless people have catharsis and laugh at it. 

Just on that embarrassment, how real are the situations that arise in Big Mouth to the writer’s room?

Unfortunately, a lot of the experiences in the show are based on real life things. Like, Andrew did cum in his pants during a dance. I didn't have any pubic hair, or anything to speak of for quite some time. Our friend Liz did get her period for the first time on a class trip to the Statue of Liberty. And our friend used to have sex with his pillow, so we used that as well.

The opening sequence has some really cool visuals and song selection – how much input did you have on that aspect of the show?

You know, a lot. We were trying to find a song for the theme and it took a while, and it's an expensive thing to buy. And we had a few ideas, but I listened to Charles Bradley who just passed away, and I heard that song “Changes” which is actually a Black Sabbath cover. It just felt like, obviously the song is about changes which is what our show's about and also just the feeling in his voice of heartbreak and pain felt like a nice song for a vocalisation of what that time in life feels like and felt like. And yeah, we had a great editor and production team and music people who helped us figure it out and try to find songs that fit in, like “Lady In Red” is a song which is a major part of me and Andrew's childhood. But then also we made a lot of the music – Mark Rivers, who I've been working with since Kroll Show and who does a ton of different music for comedy stuff, and otherwise, Mark was able to come in and just nail every song and version of a song that we wanted. We wanted a song that sounds like R.E.M's “Everybody Hurts” but it's a tampon and we want to call it “Everybody Bleeds”, and then he came back with that song. Or “Totally Gay” was like, well, we want something that sounds like a Queen song, and he can just whip it up and really, literally make it sing.

Big Mouth has an all star cast – was that something that was difficult to wrangle or did the format help in bringing it all together?

It's kind of both in that, it wasn't difficult to wrangle because it's all my friends, which is a special part of the show. I mean, I went to college with John [Mulaney] and had worked with him ever since then. Jessi Klein, Jenny Slate and Jason Mantzoukas, I met very early on in New York doing comedy. And then Jordan [Peele] and Maya [Rudolph] and Fred [Armisen] I'd met over the last few years and become friends with. And then the rest of the actors are almost all people that I've become friendly with, like Andrew Rannells plays Matthew, and Kat Dennings plays Leah and Jon Daly plays my brother Judd. Almost every voice in the show is someone I met and became friends with, and animation allows people with very busy schedules to be a part of it, because it's not super demanding on their time that it allows them to do it and also go do everything else that all these incredibly talented people want to do.

How much improvisation was involved in the voice acting? I noticed here and there that the characters have slight asides that all sound really natural.

Yeah, we tried as much as possible to have people recording together. Especially, you know, they're all my friends and they're all amazing improvisers. So, when you've got Jason Mantzoukas or Jenny Slate, or I mean really all of them – they're all so individually funny and almost all of them are writers unto themselves. We wanted to use that, but also we wanted something more natural, people sort of talking to each other with overlapping when available, and that's us in the room. And there's a few examples in every episode of moments discovered in the recording booth when there's more than one of us in there together.   


Do you feel like this show addresses a lot of topics and themes that even live-action shows have been afraid to touch for a long time?

Yeah, our goal was to make a show that felt relevant to issues that we were going through and that kids are going through now. The first episode is ‘am I normal if my body still looks different than my friend's body?”, the second episode is about getting your period, the third episode is about “am I gay?”, the fourth episode is how crazy and emotionally brutal those sleepovers could be early on, the fifth episode is about “girls are horny too”. We have episodes about consent, what's the line, and the “Pornscape”, you know, we really tried to cover a lot of stuff we think kids today are going through.

How much harder would this have been to make anywhere else but with Netflix?

It would have been hard to do literally what we've done because even cable would have a lot of trouble with our content. I'm not interested in saying it’s edgy, but it definitely pushes some boundaries. And also being able to put it on Netflix where they encourage you to tell longer stories through a season, they're not just telling you to make a show every week that just resets in the same place. They want stuff to go places because they've found that their viewers respond to that and they want the experience of bingeing a show. We were now encouraged to push the boundaries in the content of it but also how we told stories, which I think makes for–at least on the writer's end–a much more fruitful experience of watching characters learn things and absorb things and then process them and then make decisions based on them.

Is this a show that you think teenagers would find value in watching despite some of the more adult themes?

We made the show that I would want to watch. So, I think we made a show that hopefully adults want to watch for sure, people in their twenties and teens. But, I think there's a world where I'd love for kids who are the age of the characters in the show to watch the show. It's very, very dirty but it also, I think, is talking about a bunch of stuff that they're really going through that could have a larger useful impact. So, I think I'm curious to see if parents and kids will watch it, or if parents let their kids watch it, and then it gives them some stuff to talk about in a grander scheme of things. We kind of wanted to make the sex-ed video that we never got to watch, that's also funny.

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