Comedian Nick Kroll has opened up about the difficult journey of helping to stage an intervention for his longtime friend John Mulaney during the height of the COVID pandemic.
During a recent interview on Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert podcast, Kroll recounted the emotional process of helping a group of Mulaney's loved ones facilitate the intervention, which led to Mulaney entering rehab in 2020.
"It was so scary and brutal to go through," Kroll said on the episode. "It was incredibly stressful to be in the midst of the pandemic trying to literally coordinate and produce an intervention, bringing a bunch of different people together, friends from college, and my wife was pretty pregnant."
Referencing another reportedly dramatic development, Kroll also joked, "I was shooting Don't Worry Darling, which, there was no stress there!"
He then recalled that "John was running around New York City like a true madman, and I was so deeply scared he was gonna die."
Kroll said that orchestrating the intervention was "so f---ing stressful" as a result, and said that, while he had empathy for Mulaney, there's also realistically "a tremendous amount of anger" in dealing with substance abuse.
The actor also revealed "a very clear memory of being outside sitting on the ground on the phone with [Mulaney], both of us crying, being like, 'I'm so scared you're gonna die.' I felt him feeling the same way."
Kroll said that Mulaney's post-rehab standup material initially rubbed him the wrong way, but said he understood that the comedian "was still pretty pissed off about the intervention, because he was having a good time."
Still, Kroll said he didn't think that having jokes about him and the intervention sat well with him at the time.
"We talked about it and I was like, 'I don't love how you're representing this,'" Kroll recalled, adding that Mulaney was receptive to his concern. "Everyone's process and art is different. So, what he's willing to share is what makes him so f---ing funny and dynamic and intoxicating as a performer. He's giving you a written version of his life, but he's giving you access to elements of himself, and I myself am very guarded in certain ways like that, but it's what makes him such an amazing standup."
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to representatives for Mulaney for comment.
In addition to speaking on stage about his history with addiction and his intervention, in a 2023 interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Mulaney further opened up about his celebrity friends who helped him realize he needed to check into rehab.
"I was flattered when I walked in. I honestly was like, this is a good lineup," Mulaney said at the time. "You don't know it's an intervention when you come to it. I thought it was dinner with two friends from college. It was not."
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"I was two hours late for that dinner. They were madder about that. All their concern for me as a drug addict really went away with the two hours late," he joked. "During the intervention, at one point I went, 'Oh is there a car downstairs?' And they went, 'Yeah.' And I was like, 'Oh my God.' When I was walking in they said, 'Shoes off.' I was like, that's odd, I don't normally have to do that. I took my shoes off so I didn't bolt once it started."
In 2024, Mulaney revealed to GQ that his wife, actress Olivia Munn, staged mini interventions after the couple learned they were expecting a baby, with the couple agreeing that Munn would administer random drug tests ahead of the birth of their son, Malcolm.
Listen to Kroll discuss Mulaney's intervention in the podcast episode above.