Nick Kroll, on why he filmed in L.A.: “It feels like it’s about people who live in Los Angeles”

Nick Kroll built an entire career inside Los Angeles — the sketch stages, the writers’ rooms, the studios that turned a live-show comic into a franchise machine. So when he was asked why his new Netflix comedy simply had to be shot in the city it depicts, he skipped the policy language and reached for the plainest reason a working artist can give.

Taking the stage as a keynote speaker at Variety’s Entertainment & Technology Summit, the actor and producer folded the whole case for keeping cameras in Los Angeles into one almost offhand line about belonging:

“It feels like it’s about people who live in Los Angeles. I’ve lived here for almost 20 years,”

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The line matters because it lands against an industry that has spent years voting with its feet. Production has fled the city that invented it, chasing cheaper labor and fatter rebates to Atlanta, Vancouver, Budapest and London; soundstages went dark and crews sat idle while the work went elsewhere. California answered by sharply expanding its film-and-television tax credit, and Kroll’s “A Hundred Percent” — co-created with Gabe Liedman, starring Sam Richardson, Jason Mantzoukas and Vanessa Bayer — became one of the shows that chose to stay.

What the quote reveals about Kroll is that he refuses to argue the point as an accountant. He frames the decision as authenticity, not arithmetic: a story about Angelenos should be made by Angelenos, on the streets they actually live on. Coming from someone who has spent nearly two decades here, it reads less like a pitch than a confession — the city isn’t a backdrop he rented, it’s the material.

And yet a heartfelt appeal is still, structurally, an argument — and it arrives exactly when the subsidy debate is loudest. Tax credits are public money, and the warm rhetoric tends to skip the harder question of who the subsidy finally serves: the below-the-line crews a busy lot keeps employed, or the streamers and studios that can pocket the incentive here and bank the next one somewhere cheaper the moment the math shifts. Kroll’s sincerity is not in doubt. It also doesn’t settle that arithmetic.

That is the tension underneath the plea. A city cannot run on love letters, and goodwill has never held a production in place against a better offer. But if enough of those letters arrive with a shoot attached — a full crew, a real budget, a summer of work — then Kroll may have stumbled onto the only argument that actually brings life back.

Tags: Netflix, Los Angeles, Nick Kroll, A Hundred Percent, Film Production

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