Talking about why the sitcom failed and whether he’d try again one day, he offered a comment that seemed to encapsulate how he saw his career, and that provided our headline: “I'm sort of never relevant and therefore kind of never irrelevant,” he told me. Joking about his Constantine get-up on Seth Meyers (a bit that was nixed for Marvel-DC reasons), led to him talking about his ideal talk show format: interviewing a really old person and a really young person. The ghost comment led him into a tangent about a horror-comedy idea he’d once thought of.
I spent most of the interview (done over the phone, not Zoom) thinking Mulaney was lightly trolling me-having a little fun with the idea that he was doing an interview about voicing an animated superhero pig. Our conversation was as loose, wide-ranging and whimsical as I hoped it would be-but for the wrong reasons, as I’d soon learn. I also figured someone as quick-witted as Mulaney would give me fodder for follow-up questions in the moment.Īnd did he ever. Clear eyes, full heart, can’t lose.įrom there I sketched out a loose arc of asking him about the backlash he’d gotten for appearing indifferent to the presidential election, his Netflix Sack Lunch Bunch special, and his NBC sitcom that had failed to launch and which he hadn’t said much about since. It was a reference to his material designed to elicit an interesting answer. So David and I settled on opening with a callback to a bit in Mulaney’s Kid Gorgeous special about blurting out “You ever seen a ghost?” as an icebreaker.
Two months before, he hosted Saturday Night Live, commenting on the current events I might have asked him about, and he’d also recently appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers. I wasn’t quite sure where to start with John. A few months ago, I spoke to A$AP Rocky on the occasion of him designing a Mercedes for the Need for Speed video game we wound up having a poignant conversation about him approaching 10 years in the industry and his late friend A$AP Yams. It can be much more liberating to talk to an entertainer with no guardrails or boxes to check. But when I spoke to John Mulaney, it was a rare case where there was no peg: His team had him doing press because he was reprising his role of Spider-Ham in an Into the Spiderverse videogame, but they were fine with me asking about whatever I wanted. As people in media know, interviews and profiles are usually “pegged” to a specific release or event that the writer is expected to ask the subject about.
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