Nick Kroll Says He’s Open To Taking More Kroll Show Characters Center Stage
This week, Sarah Jacobs had the opportunity to chat with Nick Kroll, one of the funniest, and from what she learned after speaking with him, most down-to-earth people around. Nick is known for starring in The League, as well as I Love You, Man, and of course, Kroll Show. With the release of Kroll Show Season 3 on DVD, Sarah spoke with Nick about saying goodbye to the hit show. The DVD is full of special features that fans will love, like Bryan La Cróix Performing “Ottowanna Go To bed”, Chairs: Matt and Ben, Bobby Bottleservice and Peter Paparazzo Perform “Broin’ Country” (Ft. Senor Feeture). Nick told us that he would be open to the idea of taking more characters to their own projects, and revealed that Mikey (Bryan La Croix) almost made it to an actual episode of Degrassi! He also talked about his new Netflix animated series, Big Mouth! Read more below!
There are so many hilarious and wonderful characters from Kroll Show that were hard for fans to say goodbye to. I asked Nick which character he misses the most.
“You know, they live on in various forms…I think C-Czar really weirdly felt like the most like, child of that show and we watched him grow up and become a dad…I really, I miss C-Czar.”
Oh, Hello was a huge hit on tour, so I wondered if he ever considered taking any other characters on the road.
“I used to do Fabrice and Bobby Bottleservice and stuff like that every once in awhile live, but all that makeup is a pain in the ass.”
The comedy nerd in me finds it so interesting to learn how much of any given comedy show is actually improvised, so I asked how much improv was involved with Kroll Show.
“It was a real mix of very, very scripted and then also total freedom to improvise. So what ended up on screen, it’s tough to say percentage wise, I mean some sketches were very tightly scripted and then some sketchers were basic outlines and you’d run away from it. So, there was a ton of improv throughout the show and we had such a funny group of people that it’d seem like a waste not to utilize their talent so like, you know, I could point to Publizity or Oh, Hello, and like, there’s no way you could write a joke for Jenny [Slate] and Liz, that she won’t come up with something slightly better coming out of her own mouth, or same with John in Oh, Hello, or Jon Daly as Wendy Shawn in Rich Dicks. It was such a talented group of people that you could for sure always write for them, but always wanted to leave room for them to put their own stamp on it.”
I could easily picture most of the characters from Kroll Show on the big screen in their own 90 minute comedy. I asked Nick if any of his characters could possibly see a full length, Saturday Night Live, type of film in the future. He responded:
“I’m open to anything, you know, obviously like, doing Oh, Hello the live show is the closest thing to that that I’ve done…It really is what characters fit best in a medium. For example doing Oh, Hello, these two men wrote a play…it just seemed like the appropriate way to handle what George and Gil would do…I don’t know. My hopes and belief is that these characters will continue to make stuff. I don’t know whether it’ll be a feature or a special or something on the web or something on a podcast, I don’t know, there are so many mediums to play with now which is great.”
I asked Nick if there were any character ideas that didn’t make it to the show that he wished would have. He said there weren’t but that he would have liked to have seen more Señor Feeture.
“I did a little bit of that Señor Feeture who’s like a Pitbull kind of guy… he’s caught in a green screen prison of his own design so he can always just feature on people’s songs. But he’s Señor Feeture, F-E-E-T-U-R-E, because he likes to fuck feet. I discovered him Season 3 of the show and I would have liked to have explored what makes him tick a little more.”
One of the things I asked was if Kroll Show ever received any flack for poking fun at certain shows or people. I figured not, since the show was pretty light hearted, but then Nick told me about an amazing idea that never happened.
“No, in fact the Degrassi people loved it, loved Wheels Ontario and the whole show. We were going to try to do a thing where Mikey, my character– well Bryan La Croix who plays Mikey– was going to do a cameo on Degrassi and I was trying to do it while I was up in Toronto, but the scheduling didn’t work out, which is a real bummer.”
How fun would that have been to see Mikey (Bryan La Croix) in an actual episode of Degrassi? Good thing Degrassi will never end, so Nick has all the time in the world to do it. The next big project from Nick is an animated show called Big Mouth. We talked about why Nick chose to do an animated show.
“Well in this particular case, Andrew Goldberg and Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett, who are my co-creators on the show, brought the idea to me. Andrew and I have been best friends since childhood and so they were like, “What about an animated show like you guys as 13 year olds?” and it just seemed like a great immediate idea like, “Yeah.” One, for me, kids get older like, Mark worked on The Wonder Years and he’s like “Fred Savage got older” and it’s tough to write-we want to keep telling those stories, those like, teen stories, but if your actors get older, it’s tough to do that. With animation everybody can stay the same age.”
Big Mouth seems like it’ll have a personal feel to it, so I asked Nick if he planned to draw from his own childhood memories.
“Yeah, it’s pulling directly from me and Andrew’s childhood as friends and then all of our writers, I mean that’s the beautiful thing about a show basically about puberty is that everybody has gone through it and has their own take and there’s very specific things, but also unbelievably universal quality to it. There’s a wealth of stories to tell.”
Nick made sure to end the interview with a name check to our own Jeffrey Gurian, calling him one of the stars of Kroll Show and saying “It’s crazy to talk to The Interrobang and not be talking to Gurian.”
Make sure to binge watch all your favorite episodes of Season 3 on DVD with special features and follow Nick Kroll on Twitter @nickkroll!
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Sarah Jacobs
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