Nick Kroll Recalls the 'Scary and Brutal' Process of Organizing John Mulaney's Intervention
Nick Kroll recalled the stressful process of organizing the intervention for his friend and collaborator John Mulaney on Dax Shepard's podcast.
Nick Kroll spoke about the stress of “producing” the intervention for his longtime friend and collaborator John Mulaney during the Covid-19 pandemic. “John was running around New York City like a true madman, and I was so deeply scared that he was going to die,” Kroll recalled during a new interview on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast.
The intervention — which Mulaney has since spoken about in his own stand-up comedy — took place in late 2020. Not only was the pandemic still raging, with no vaccines available, but Kroll was tasked with organizing the intervention from the other side of the country in Los Angeles. Additionally, his wife was pregnant at the time, and he was working on the film Don’t Worry Darling. (“There was no stress there,” Kroll deadpanned about the famously fraught film.)
“It was so scary and brutal to go through,” Kroll recalled. “He was in New York. I was in L.A. It was at the height of the pandemic. So it was incredibly 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, other close friends.”
On top of all these logistics (which also included finding a rehab facility that Mulaney could go to immediately after the intervention), Kroll spoke about how the experience forced him to see Mulaney’s recent behavior in a different light.
“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 said. “So, it gives you both empathy for them, and also a tremendous amount of anger because they’ve been lying.”
Kroll even shared a vivid memory of a phone call he had with Mulaney in the days before the intervention, saying, “I have a very clear memory of being outside, sitting on the ground, on the phone with him, both of us crying, me just being like, ‘I’m just so scared you’re going to die.’ And I felt him feeling the same way, but also like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah — but anyway, I’m in this new AirBnb, I gotta go!’”
When Mulaney got out of rehab and started doing stand-up again, he made the intervention part of his set, with a version of the bit appearing in his 2023 special, Baby J. Kroll, for his part, admitted he was uneasy with the material at first, in part because Mulaney was “still pretty fucking pissed about the intervention” even after getting out of rehab. And because, Kroll said, he wasn’t sure he liked being joked about after working so hard to save his friend.
Eventually, the two friends discussed the matter, with Kroll acknowledging that what makes Mulaney so “fucking funny and dynamic and intoxicating as a performer is that he’s giving you a written version of life, he’s giving you access to elements of himself.”
Mulaney, for his part, said in Baby J, “I am grateful to everyone at my intervention. They confronted me, and they totally saved my life.”
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