How ‘Big Mouth’ Taught A Generation That ‘You’re Not the Only One Who’s A Creep’

Big Mouth is a rigorously researched, famously frank show about how a specific group of animated kids are surviving the ravages of puberty. How specific? Its co-creators include Andrew Goldberg and Nick Kroll, lifelong friends who decided not only to represent some of their real-life stories on screen, but to have them played out by fictionalized avatars of themselves. (Kroll voices his alter ego, Nick Birch, among countless other characters on the show; Andrew Glouberman is performed by John Mulaney.) 

Joining Kroll and Goldberg is another pair of creative partners who’ve remained off-screen: Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, married collaborators whose credits include the screenplays for Wimbledon and Journey to the Center of the Earth. 

Though Hormone Monsters Maury (voice of Kroll) and Connie (Maya Rudolph) once memorably speculated that Flackett, Goldberg, Kroll and Levin are all married to each other (Maury: “Fucking Hollywood”), a conversation with Levin, Goldberg, and Flackett last week revealed no such arrangement. We did discuss how the two pairs joined forces to make the show; why the plan for the show’s run was always to concern itself with its lead characters’ puberty; what it’s been like working with both rising stars like Ayo Edebiri and Jordan Peele, and veteran thespians like David Thewlis; and how their connection to the show sometimes induces strangers to tell them outrageous sex stories of their own.

How did the two pairs of creators come to work together on this project?

Mark Levin: Wow, that’s quite a story.

Andrew Goldberg: Well, that story begins in 1984 on the first day of first grade, which is when Nick and I met. Nick and I grew up together, went to school with each other until eighth grade—

Jennifer Flackett: Went to camp together.

AG: Went to camp together, stayed friends into adulthood. And Mark and Jen and I met in 2000 or 2001. I was in film school at UCLA, and this was back in the days when you used to have those little flyers with numbers that you would pull off the bottom. So I saw one of those in the film office. People were looking for a part-time assistant and a babysitter—

JF: They were two different flyers.

AG: Two different flyers. And I took the part-time assistant one, and I came in to interview with them. And I remember the first thing you guys said. You said, “Can we call you Goldie?” And I wanted the job, so I said, “Sure,” and didn’t realize that I’d then, for 25 years and counting, be called “Goldie.” But I also said, “I’ve got your babysitter, too.” That was my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, Colleen. She babysat their daughter who was a toddler at that time and is now a grown adult. So that’s how we met. And then you guys met Nick through me. 

JF: Well, we met Nick through Andrew briefly. We definitely knew of Nick, but then we happened to run into Nick. What year was that?

ML: It was 2014.

JF: It was 2014. We ran into Nick. Mark and I had just taken a trip around the world with our kids for one year. And we had come back and Nick saw us at this reading for a different animated show. And he said, “The traveling family! Where are you going next?” And we said, “We’re going to Mexico City at Christmas.” And he said, “I’m going to be in Mexico City around then.” And we said, “Well, we should get together.” 

Unbeknownst to us, he was really like, “Okay, I’ll go see this family, but I’m going to be a cool single guy in Mexico City.” So we all had dinner with Nick and with our kids, and then it was like, “You know, maybe we’ll see each other again.” Nick was like, “Yeah, maybe.” And then he was a little lonely in Mexico City. It turned out it wasn’t that cool to be by himself. He called us the next time: “What are you guys doing?” And we were like, “Well, we’re going to go to these ruins. Do you want to come?” And so we all were in the tiniest car with a driver, me sitting on everybody’s lap. We ended up spending five days with Nick, and he became like this other member of the family. 

Oh! And we forgot an important part of the story, which was that we had worked with Andrew again when we got back from our trip. We wanted to write something for television. We hadn’t written for television in a while. So we asked Goldie, “Who’s the next young Andrew Goldberg? We are looking for someone who wants to collaborate with us.” And Andrew was like, “What’s wrong with the old Andrew Goldberg? I’d like to do that.”

We had written one pilot together, it didn’t go, but we loved the experience. And so Andrew had said, “Well, let’s do an animated show.” He had an idea called Bar Mitzvah Boys, which was about five boys in a Jewish day school and the adventures they get in. Andrew left and I turned to Mark like, “I’m never going to write that show.”

AG: But you did. 

JF: But I did! Then after we all hung out together, Mark said, “Not Bar Mitzvah Boys. Andrew and Nick, they’re not going to a Jewish day school. They’re going to a regular public school with girls, and it’s about puberty.” So he kind of took the best parts of Andrew’s thing: “What about that?” And I was like, “I will do that show.”

AG: And I said, “As long as everyone’s circumcised.”

JF: Exactly right. No, we do have one uncircumcised.

AG: Jay.

JF: Like a yam. Right?

AG: Yes.

JF: Anyway, so then we told Andrew, “What do you think about this kind of this rejiggering?” He was like, “That’s great.” We told Nick, and Nick really was on board right from the beginning.

AG: And it was really interesting too because Nick and I, when we were kids, used to do sketches and stuff together for fun, but had never worked together professionally. And it could have gone poorly, but it didn’t.

JF: No, no, no. Actually, one of our big things when we came back from our trip was, “We only want to work with people that we really like.” Sometimes, with friendship and working together, you don’t know how it's going to go. But this has been such a happy collaboration.

ML: Nick and Andrew have been friends for 40-plus years. Jen and I have been together for 35 years. We’ve been friends for 25 years. So it’s about 110 years of friendship, all told, all mooshed together to make the show. So the bond that we all have is pretty incredible and very rare in Hollywood.

I know that, in the early going, you used to have pairs of actors recording in the booth together and improvising off each other. I presume that changed with COVID, when everyone had to record themselves at home. Did it ever come back?

JF: Not only two actors. We’d sometimes have five people in the booth together. It was amazing.

AG: It was really fun.

JF: It was so fun. It was like a party. Every record day was a party. We just loved it. And then came COVID.

ML: Then came COVID. Some of them had to be their own engineers. Maya Rudolph had to crawl under a blanket in their living room and try to operate the microphone and the whole thing. So that was a real challenge. And then our goal was to make it seem as if they were in the booth together to have them improv within their lines. We had a library of little “um”s and “er”s that we could add to make it seem like they were overlapping. On our new show, Mating Season, which comes out next year, we have made a real point of getting all the actors back in the booth. We’ve done a lot more group records on that show. 

Another phenomenon on Big Mouth is that our cast, which in the early days were all pretty successful, have become very, very successful.

JF: Megastars. Yes.

ML: John Mulaney, Maya Rudolph, Jordan Peele—

JF: Ayo.

ML: All these people, they all had a little bit of time to get in the booth. Now scheduling and finding time that everybody with their crowded schedules can work, it became a lot harder over time.

AG: They tend to not all be available on any given Thursday.

JF: Yes, those were good days, but I will say for our final season—

AG: We got more people together.

JF: And it was really important to Andrew, actually. Some people loved working at home, but Andrew was like, “I really want to do the final season in person in the writers’ room.” And that we did. And it really made a huge difference. But we even were able to get Nick and John into a booth together, especially for that final episode. We really wanted to, as much as we could, recapture that feeling.

This last season demonstrates there are post-puberty stories to tell about these characters. What made you all decide this was still the right time to stop?

ML: Well, it’s interesting because puberty is a finite period in life. For some people it lasts longer. And we demonstrate that. For some people, it starts later and all that, but it has a beginning, middle and end, and it’s a phase of life. And that gave us the opportunity to not define this through when the characters graduate high school or something like that, but to really look at this period of change. The show has always been about changes. This period of this kind of giant change in their lives reaches a nice conclusion around this time. It focused our storytelling, when we and Netflix all said, “Eight seasons, we’ll bring it to a close. It’s great that we had eight seasons to go through puberty, but we thought that focusing on what is the end of Andrew’s puberty, that kind of put a punctuation mark on the whole series.

JF: Of course there is that funny thing. We all had agreed to eight: “Puberty stories, there’s only so many of them.” But then when we got there in the end, writing the final season, when you get them into high school, there’s all these other stories to tell. But I think there’s a wonderful thing about leaving the audience wanting more. And maybe this isn’t the last we’ll ever see of these people.

Over the years, it seems like your thinking has evolved on what and whom the show is for — if it’s a show for adults that’s about kids, or for parents and kids to watch together, or to watch separately. Here at the end, where do you all come down on this question?

JF: Well, we’ve always said, or at least we always say to people who ask us, it’s for anyone who’s going through puberty or has gone through puberty. So that’s a real simple one. Very often, parents will say, is it okay for my 13-year-old or 12-year-old to watch Big Mouth?” To which we always say, “You should watch it first. I can’t give you that answer.” And we also always say — I always say, especially to women: “Please watch the first two because it’s important. It’s not just about boys masturbating, it’s also about girls getting their period!”

AG: And masturbating.

JF: And masturbating! By the fifth episode, they’re masturbating too. And one of the great, great happinesses has been having parents say to us, “I watch it, and my kid watches it. Usually not together because it’s uncomfortable, but we have really good conversations afterwards.” That’s always been the case, since it went out into the world. We had a similar feeling when we were making it. It’s a show about kids written, but about, and kind of for adults… Are we making a show for nobody? 

AG: Mulaney asked that question.

JF: On the first day.

AG: He was like, “Who is this for? It’s about kids, but kids can’t watch it.” And I was like, “Oh God, I didn’t even think of that.”

JF: And Mark said the same thing the night before it came out: “Oh god.”

AG: But the truth is, I really wasn’t thinking that much about who it was for. And I think what the secret really was, and I think why people liked it, is that we were making it for us. We were making the show that wasn’t on TV that we wanted to see. And ultimately, if you can succeed in making the show that doesn’t exist yet that you would really want to watch, then that’s half the battle.

Your own kids have grown up through the years you’ve been doing the show. Have your kids ever said they would want a version of themselves in the show? Or conversely, have they said, “Do not ever do that, I forbid it”?

ML: Closer to the latter. Definitely closer to the latter.

AG: It’s really interesting, because when the show first started, your kids were really in this area.

ML: Our daughter was 16.

JF: Our son was 12, and they would really, in the very beginning, come into the room and talk to us.

ML: They would talk about the experiences they were having and their observations. They were very helpful to the early seasons of the show. Haven’t gotten your kids in since, actually, but they’re just coming into it now.

AG: Yeah, with my kids, our deal was always, “You can watch the show when you’re the age of the kids.” So when they turned 12, they were allowed to watch, which meant that my son, when he turned 12 this year, was allowed to watch. And he’s not even 13 now, and he’s seen the show three or four times. He’s so into it. My daughter, when she turned 12, got four episodes in and was like, “I can’t.” And I remember at the time, coming into work and being like, “What the hell? She’s been peeking over my shoulder while I’m working, trying to watch this thing for five years. And now she gets to, and she’s not that into it.” One of our writers was like, “Is it possible she doesn’t like watching her father as a child masturbate?” I was like, “Oh. Okay. Yeah, that’s fair.”

JF: Your parents too.

AG: Yeah. Oh my God. My parents, at first, did not like it.

ML: Well, yeah, they came to embrace it. 

JF: Once it was successful. 

AG: Once everybody else liked it, they got on board.

This seems like the kind of project that requires the people who work on it to stay very open to new ideas, learning all the time. Is there a single most surprising thing that you learned from working on the show?

AG: I’m going to say I’ve learned so much both from the experts that we brought in, sex educators like Shafia Zaloom, and doctors like Cara Natterson, who’ve been so helpful to us. Journalists like Peggy Orenstein. To me, what’s been most impactful for my personal life was the season that we did about shame, with the Shame Wizard and the research that we did there. There was a lot of Brené Brown’s stuff, and just that realization of how much of shame has to do with not talking about things. If you don’t talk about it, then you assume that it’s shameful, but then when you do start talking about it, you realize that other people are having very similar experiences and you feel less alone. And that, to me, has been very impactful. And I think that really crystallized, in a way, that the mission of the show is to talk about the things that we’re otherwise embarrassed about, because you realize that they’re universal and you’re not the only one who’s a creep.

JF: I just really felt like, “Wow, the breadth of human development and sexuality is vast.” There were things I just don’t think I’d really thought about. I remember we were talking with older friends of ours, maybe it was about gender identity or something, and they were like, “I don’t know about that.” And I really remember being like, “I’m throwing in with the young people.” I felt like that was what the show gave me. That was my lesson. I don’t need to be saying “That’s not how it was in my day,” because it’s not that interesting to me.

AG: And that’s the other half of how we’ve learned. We’ve brought in all these experts, but we also, at least once a season, talk to teenagers and run ideas by them and talk to them about what’s important to them. “We’re doing a story about porn and how it affects the teenage mind. What’s your experience on that?” And we’ve also found that when you get a group of teenagers together and ask them these questions, they have thoughts and they’re good, and they’re eager to share.

Does it ever happen that people find out you work on the show and then just start telling you their stories?

AG: Oh my God! Yes. One time, there was this woman who was easily in her late eighties who at an event grabbed me and told me about — this must’ve been pre-war — her best friend when she was a teenager, teaching her how to give a blow job by having her watch her give her boyfriend a blow job. 

I was like, “Thank you.’ And I remember my wife kind of came into the middle of this conversation, looking at me like, “How did you get here?!”

You’ve already brought it up, but Netflix just announced you’re all doing a new show together called Mating Season. What can you say about it?

ML: It’s a different phase of life that we’re exploring, which is in your mid to late 20s when you’re looking for your person, or in this case looking for your animal. It’s about dating and hooking up and falling in love and all the things that people wrestle with at that point in their life. And it’s funny because our kids now, 10 years after Big Mouth premiered, are entering that phase in their lives, and we’re drawing from them again, just watching them go through this period and finding inspiration. Dealing with animals allows us to tell these funny, sexy stories, but to not be so literal.

Big Mouth started in a time when TV was booming. But in recent years, especially since the strikes, the number of writing jobs has gone down. What has it been like staffing up this time?

ML: We’ve been very, very lucky to have a show that’s kind of survived through the pandemic, through the writers’ strikes, all that. And to be able to provide work for not only a lot of writers, but a lot of actors, a lot of artists, storytellers in all forms in animation. So we’re really grateful that we’ve been kind of an island for everyone to gather on.

AG: And our crew on the new show, there’s a lot of continuity with the Big Mouth crew. Because we like them.

ML: Especially the artists. We have a lot of trust for each other, a lot of respect. And being able to continue to tell stories is incredible. But staffing up, you find that there are a lot of people who need work now. There’s a lot more need, just a deeper pool. I mean, it’s unfortunate, obviously, how hard it is for a lot of writers to find work right now. We are grateful to be able to provide the jobs that we can.

JF: And grateful that we have jobs.

Mark and Jennifer, you came from the live-action world, but by 2021, Jennifer was telling GoldDerby you had no interest in leaving animation. Is that still true?

ML: We never said “never.”

JF: I believe I said “no intention.” Someday, I think we’d very much like to go back to live action. The thing that really surprised me was how much I liked animation, and that was really the thing. I had expected to miss live action more. When we were making Human Resources, I remember I really thought, “Well, maybe we would have an animated show, and then the other half of the year we would do something non-animated.” And that fell away because I just think animation is a fantastic platform. I always say we get so many chances, which you don’t get in live action, to get it right. 

And we had our one episode where we had live-action Nick and Goldie. I’ll never forget it. We were looking at the dailies, because we need to have Nick come in and pick up a glass, and Goldie’s like, “Why can’t he pick up that glass faster? Can’t we just make him do it faster?” And I’m like, “No, that’s what live action is.” He was like, “I don’t like it.”

AG: Very frustrating. I prefer to control everyone. 

JF: Yes, Goldie likes full control. But I do think someday we will make a live-action thing again. But I certainly don’t yearn for it because I find animation to be so satisfying.

ML: It’s funny, when we started doing animation, someone came to me and said, “Don’t you miss working with the actors?” And we’re like, “Well, actually, we’ve never worked with more actors in our lives.” If you look at the actors we’ve worked with over the last 10 years, I can’t imagine almost anyone has gotten the opportunity to work with as many actors as we have. A little bit, I miss working with the camera, just using the camera as a storytelling tool. But other than that, animation has been just a beautiful way to spend the last decade and the years ahead.

JF: And Andrew’s been an amazing teacher about animation. He came from Family Guy for so many years and had such a seat at the table because of Seth MacFarlane. And so I’ll never forget, we were in the very beginning of Big Mouth, and we were looking at the boards or the animatic, and I was like, “Why isn’t this a two-shot?” And Andrew was like, “Well, if you want it to be a two-shot, you should write a two-shot.” And I was like, “Oh.” I didn’t understand. “Oh, you have to really lead the artist when you have a very specific thing you want. Tell them what you want and they’ll listen to you.”

Andrew, I also appreciate that you’ve said in the past that if a show is animated, there has to be a reason. A lot of shows don’t make a case for being animated, and I feel like Big Mouth has always really taken advantage of what the medium can do.

AG: Yeah. I mean, there’s so many possibilities. Especially around the pandemic, there were a lot of people who were like, “Here’s this thing that used to be live action. We should animate it.” And it’s like, “Well, no.”

JF: We really like to have a reason why it’s animated so that it’s not just sort of a live action but drawn. I mean, that’s the wonderful thing about Mating Season. You know what I mean?

AG: You couldn’t do it live-action. You couldn’t do Big Mouth live-action. It would be unpleasant. 

JF: It really would be. That’s what’s nice about having 40-year-old voices for these kids — it blurs the line in a really nice way.

This show has such a huge ensemble cast, as you’ve already said. Is there a character you’re most going to miss writing for — or watching, if they’re not the same?

ML: I mean, it’s funny because I don’t have favorite characters, but I really love the Shame Wizard, and I know that Andrew mentioned him, but David Thewlis’ role in the show was so specific, so I’ll definitely miss that character.

JF: Yes, Mark and David had a real love affair too, so I feel that also informs your answer.

AG: There’s so many. There’s always been something so fun to me about writing Mulaney’s version of me as a child. That’s always been such a trip. And there’s something weirdly therapeutic about it too. Taking all the most embarrassing parts of my childhood and making them funny makes them not scary anymore. Maury, I feel like I’ve always had a real connection to. 

JF: Oh, yes. 

AG: And then there’s a group that I call the lonely characters that I love writing for, which is Jay and Lola and Coach Steve. They’re all so weird and specific in their own way, but they all have this superhuman desire to just be loved and be part of things that I find really emotional. And then my last thing is just watching Richard Kind perform as my father has always been one of my favorite parts of the job. I find it so delightful.

JF: I love all the monsters, but making Connie the Hormone Monstress has been the best creative experience of my life. And working with Maya has been amazing. And everyone who informed that voice — that voice was hard to come by. It wasn’t like Maury. Maury came fully formed.

AG: Instantaneous, yeah.

JF: Andrew said to (Nick), “Hormone Monster”; (Nick) said, “Touch yourself, Andrew.” It was like 1, 2, 3, all done. And it took us a while with Connie, and it’s so satisfying. And her relationship with Jessi — I adore Jessi Klein (who voices her), and Jessi so informed that character. I mean, every one of our actors so informed their characters. But Jessi: If I had to pick an everywoman in the cast, I’d pick her. She’s the person who is dealing with all the stuff. She has the hardest journey, and that relationship with her and Connie, I will miss that so much. I know I’m really, really going to miss them together and I’m really going to miss Connie, and I really do feel like she will live on in all of us. You know what I mean? That life force is so strong.

AG: And watching the two of them work together was always so much fun, just how much joy Jessi really got. She’s like, “I’m sitting here. I’ve got Maya Rudolph as my hormone monster. Kristen Wiig’s my vagina. This is great.”