Fresh off Broadway —and presumably out of tuna fish—Nick Kroll and fellow Oh, Hello! star John Mulaney will return to the small screen in cartoon form on September 29 to deal with a subject even messier than the lives of two delusional and lecherous Upper West Side bachelors: puberty. Kroll and childhood best friend Andrew Goldberg (Family Guy) team up with a who’s who cast—Mulaney, Jessi Klein, Jason Mantzoukas, Jenny Slate, Jordan Peele, Fred Armisen, and Maya Rudolph, to name just the main ensemble—and the animation studio responsible for some of Adult Swim’s best and weirdest offerings on Big Mouth, a show featuring a bunch of confused middle schoolers with teenage hormonal urges and not one but two incarnations of those urges. That and the ghost of Duke Ellington. Here, Titmouse founder Chris Prynoski discusses the show, working with some of comedy’s biggest names, the next season of Venture Bros., and more.
How did this show come about?
I directed a film called Nerdland that’s an R-rated weirdo comedy animated film that was written by Andy Kevin Walker, who wrote Se7en. He’s a Hollywood screenwriter guy who writes on a bunch of stuff. And he’s friends with Mark [Levin] and Jen [Flackett], who are executive producers on Big Mouth, who teamed up with Andrew [Goldberg] and Nick to write and run the show. Basically, Andy recommended us based on his experience working with us on Nerdland, so that’s how we met these guys. Also, one of my good friends, Anthony Lioi, who’s been a Fox supervising director and he’s been with us, was being heavily courted by them to be the supervising director on the show, and he made his opinion clear that he wanted to do it at Titmouse as well.
We didn’t have anything to do with the creating of the show, but we got in early to develop it as a series. They had very little visual material when they came to us. They had one short black-and-white pencil test of the main characters and the Hormone Monster—who I’m sure will be a breakout character.
How did the animators enjoy working on the show?
I think they enjoy it quite a bit. Anthony always runs a fun show for the artists. He’s really good at accommodating the creators and making sure the artists feel comfortable and have fun. He’s, like, a magician who’s a member of the Magic Castle and he does all these fun games, and when we have certain deadlines he’ll do these crazy card games and everybody has fun and drinks and has a good time. I think the morale is really good.
As far as my involvement in the show, I’m very tertiary. I’m involved in a top-level way where I’ll go to table reads and screenings and laugh, and be like, “Wow, this is great! I love it! We made this? Nice!”
Or I’ll occasionally get involved in hiring-type positions. Otto Tang, I pushed really hard for him to be the art director and everyone’s really happy. He’s doing a kickass job. The producer [Nate Funaro], I pushed really hard to hire him, and everybody likes him. So far, so good. But that’s more the way I’m involved. I’m not writing jokes or drawing pictures.
Did you have a sense that some of these actors, who are more familiar with live-action than animation, were able to open up and let loose while recording?
Yeah, you know, it’s different. You can get in the booth and it’s really freeing because there’s not a whole crew of people watching you who are on the clock, and if you improv, you don’t get the sense that you’re burning through millions of dollars to keep people around late to experiment. There’s only an engineer and a couple of people in the booth. So I think you can play around a lot more and you can also throw away a lot more as far as the vocal track is concerned, because you can play around and play around and play around and edit bits and pieces of takes together to get what you want.
These kinds of shows always start off with really strong scripts. I was super impressed when I started going to the table reads for Big Mouth because there was really genuine laughter coming from me and from anybody else who was in the room. And a lot of times there’s kind of that “oh, we have to really sell the jokes to the room” laughter that isn’t so genuine. That wasn’t happening at these table reads. So the scripts were good, but the guys also improv in the booth, and Nick and John are both great with that. They’re amazing improv guys. They’ve done a lot of live work—they were just on Oh Hello on Broadway together—so they’ve got a lot of rapport.
I think they were a little uncertain about Kristen Wiig….And finally, “We got her! Yay!” And she was incredible.
Did any of the voice actors in the cast come out of nowhere and surprise you? And were there any big gets for the cast that were uncertain at first?
I mean, it’s got an incredible cast. I wasn’t surprised because I knew they were all great. I guess I’d be surprised if it was an unknown person that no one had ever heard of, and it’s like, “Whoa! That person should be famous!” But we were lucky to be working with such a stellar cast that’s already proven. So I felt less surprised and more fortunate, I think.
I’m not exactly sure, because I’m not on the ground every day, but I think they were a little uncertain about Kristen Wiig. With her, I think it was sort of like, “Oh, we’re gonna get her!” “Oh, no, she’s shooting something else.” “Wait, yeah, she can do it!” “Oh, no, now she can’t.” And finally, “We got her! Yay!” And she was incredible.
I can tell you one thing I felt when I first started watching the animatics. I was pleasantly surprised in the range of the tone of the show. With Andrew coming from Family Guy, I well knew there would be the kind of shocking-type jokes of that show. But I was happy to see the heart and that, as an audience, you could care about these characters. And I think that’s a unique thing about it. It’s got a little bit more sweet mixed in with the shocking than people might think there would be.
We’re currently working on Season 7 of Venture Bros. We’re probably about halfway through the season.
What else is going on at Titmouse?
A show that just launched recently for Amazon is Niko and the Sword of Light. We did that first season, and we’re working on more right now. That seems to be really well received. That’s a boy’s action series, or adventure, I guess they call it now. I’m stoked about that. We’re working on a comedy show for Amazon called Little Big Awesome that I’m stoked about. It’s really weird. It’s a 6–11 show, but I think it’ll appeal to adults in the way a lot of shows like Regular Show or Sanjay and Craig or Adventure Time.
We’re currently working on Season 7 of Venture Bros. We’re plugging along. We’re probably about halfway through the season. We don’t have any announced dates for that. That one’s so tough to talk about. I definitely can’t talk about any of the creative. All I can tell you is that we are in production and it’s well into production. I have no idea, and even if I did, I probably couldn’t tell you when they’re planning on launching it. That’s up to Mike Lazzo and Adult Swim. But it’s coming out great! My opinion is it’s awesome!
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