Nick Kroll, the comedian who hid inside 79 voices and now has to use his own

Nick Kroll

Photo: Peter Kudlacz / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 5, 1978 Rye, New York, United States
Occupation	Comedian and actor
Known for	Sing 2, Sing, The Secret Life of Pets 2
Awards	Just

Nick Kroll’s best work has almost always come out of somebody else’s mouth. A hormone monster who narrates a boy’s worst impulses with gravelly relish, a gym teacher incapable of shame, a club promoter named Bobby Bottleservice, an elderly Upper West Side bore who mistakes cruelty for wit: Kroll vanishes into each of them so thoroughly that millions of viewers can pick out his voice in a dozen roles without being able to describe his face. The question hanging over him now, with his signature series finished and a new live-action show in the can, is what his comedy looks like when the costume comes off.

The suburb that later supplied the geography of Big Mouth is Rye, New York, where Kroll grew up as the youngest of four children of Lynn and Jules Kroll. His father built the corporate investigations firm Kroll Inc. into a fortune; the household was Conservative Jewish, and the schooling ran from the Solomon Schechter School of Westchester to Rye Country Day School. Suburban comfort and the particular humiliations of early adolescence became his raw material.

He studied history at Georgetown University, graduating in 2001. New York followed: writing for Chappelle’s Show and MTV’s Human Giant, regular sets at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, and in 2005 a book, Bar Mitzvah Disco, written with Jules Shell and Roger Bennett, the journalist who later married his sister Vanessa. His first real break was a strange one: Cavemen, the ABC sitcom spun out of a series of Geico insurance commercials, was cancelled after seven episodes in 2007, yet Kroll has called it the most important experience of his professional career.

The next decade ran on two tracks. On FX he played Rodney Ruxin, the most venomous member of a fantasy-football friend group, in The League from 2009 to 2015, while picking up film parts in I Love You, Man and Get Him to the Greek. On Comedy Central he built Kroll Show, a sketch series that ran from 2013 to 2015 and turned his gallery of characters into parodies of reality television. The Just For Laughs festival named him its Breakout Star of the Year in 2013. The character work found its purest form in Oh, Hello, created with John Mulaney, in which the pair play Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland, two aging Manhattan men convinced of their own brilliance. The show reached Broadway in September 2016, ran for six months and was filmed for Netflix in 2017.

Then came the project that defined him. Big Mouth, which Kroll created with his childhood best friend Andrew Goldberg and the writers Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett, premiered on Netflix in September 2017 and treated puberty with a frankness American animation had rarely attempted. Two of its schoolboys are named after, and modelled on, Kroll and Goldberg. Kroll voiced his own fictional younger self, along with Maury the Hormone Monster, Coach Steve, the popular girl Lola and a long list of others; The Hollywood Reporter counted 79 characters by the end. The series ran for eight seasons, closing in May 2025 as one of Netflix’s longest-running original scripted shows, and spun off Human Resources, which lasted two seasons between 2022 and 2023.

Alongside the animation, Kroll has quietly taken roles that cut against his comic persona. In Jeff Nichols’s Loving he played Bernie Cohen, the young ACLU lawyer who took Richard and Mildred Loving’s challenge to Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage to the Supreme Court, and in Operation Finale he was the Israeli intelligence officer Rafi Eitan, part of the team that captured Adolf Eichmann. He remained a steady presence in family animation too, as Gunter the dancing pig in Sing and as Professor Poopypants in Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, a performance that earned him an Annie nomination. His 2022 Netflix stand-up hour, Little Big Boy, dropped the characters altogether to talk about a first real heartbreak at 33 and about becoming a father, and in 2023 he co-created the Hulu sketch series History of the World, Part II with Mel Brooks, Wanda Sykes and Ike Barinholtz.

The record also shows the limits of the method. Big Mouth collected three consecutive Emmy nominations for Outstanding Animated Program, but no win, and while Maya Rudolph took the voice-over Emmy three times for the show’s Hormone Monstress, Kroll, who carried far more of its vocal weight, never won one for his own performances. The later seasons drew cooler reviews than the early ones, and Mating Season, his first new animated series after the finale, landed with a split verdict: IndieWire’s review argued it was both too much and too little like Big Mouth, and its aggregate scores sit in the high sixties and low seventies. There is a harder reading as well. Much of Kroll’s character comedy mocks status-obsessed, money-soaked men, and it comes from the son of a man who built one of the best-known private investigation firms in the world. That can be read as insider precision or as a comedian whose targets rarely stray far from home; the stand-up special, which aimed its jokes squarely at himself, is the closest thing to an answer he has given.

The present is crowded. In February 2026 he voiced Modo Olachenko, a Komodo dragon, in Sony Pictures Animation’s basketball comedy GOAT, which grossed more than 195 million dollars worldwide. In April he played Brian, the father of Sadie Sandler’s college student, in the Netflix comedy Roommates, directed by Chandler Levack. In May came Mating Season, a romantic comedy about forest animals built by the same Big Mouth team, in which Kroll voices Ray, a raccoon, opposite Zach Woods, June Diane Raphael and Sabrina Jalees.

Kroll, who was born on June 5, 1978, met the landscape artist Lily Kwong in 2018; they married in November 2020, their son was born in January 2021, and they announced the birth of a daughter in November 2023.

The next test is the one his career has postponed longest. A Hundred Percent, a half-hour Netflix comedy he co-created with Gabe Liedman, puts him at the centre of a live-action ensemble, playing one man instead of a gallery of them, in a circle of friends who sell books, podcasts and wellness advice. He shares the screen with Sam Richardson, Jason Mantzoukas, Vanessa Bayer and, in a recurring role, Diane Lane. It shot in Los Angeles between June and August 2026, and at a Variety summit in September Kroll called it a love letter to the city, arguing that “the more that we have a thriving, ongoing shooting community here in Los Angeles, it will bring life back.” Netflix has not yet set a release date.

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Tags: actors, John Mulaney, Big Mouth, Nick Kroll, Mating Season, Andrew Goldberg

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