The thing that was fun about doing this character was that I spoke in my voice the way I talk, with slight volume raises. Well, how does it feel to be reprising the character again, now, for this campaign that you're doing?
And if you think I'm not just making that movie up on my feet, you're absolutely wrong. As opposed to being like the team without much money, they’re the team that sees ghosts, so that's why they're last in the league. And I always thought that that would be a fun like Bad News Bears type movie, where either one of the players sees ghosts or maybe it's kind of like a down and out of team because they all see ghosts and that's their thing. And it was about real life Sixth Sense kids. I do have an idea-I used to watch this show Ghost Kids: Children of the Paranormal. I'm not good with horror devices like twists and things like that, but I could write a comedy about someone who's just haunted and scary. I feel like there's a horror comedy in your head begging to come out at some point. That's the only time I've really had a creeping sense of ghouls and ghosts out of nowhere and then have it be proven correct. I'm going to walk away from here with my dog." And then I found out it was called the Murder House of Los Feliz and it had a terrible history. I was just kind of like, "Oh, what's this house." And then, slowly, I was like, "I don't like this place. Although I walked by a house that was haunted in Los Angeles and I didn't know it was haunted. I think when I first walked past it, I knew what it was. It's a vacuum cleaner store on 14th between 5th and 6th and it used to be a boarding house.
This conversation took place two weeks ago, before news broke that Mulaney had checked himself into a 60-day stay at rehab. GQ hopped on the phone for a wide-ranging conversation: Mulaney talked about why he’s never felt more himself than when he’s voicing an animated pig, and a host of other ideas and projects that are never far from his mind. Mulaney picked his own lineup of characters and reprises Spider-Ham, which he first took on in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Now there’s a new season of Big Mouth, his Netflix animated series with Nick Kroll and a month-long campaign for Marvel Contest of Champions, a mobile arcade-style fighting game. He went quiet for a while, and then the work came in quickly: he returned to host Saturday Night Live for a fourth time this past fall, and announced he’d be joining Late Night With Seth Meyers as a writer and occasional “correspondent” not long after. Around this time last year, the comedian John Mulaney took his biggest creative risk yet, releasing The Sack Lunch Bunch: a Netflix special The New Yorker described as “not quite a children’s show for adults and not quite an adult show for children.” Whatever it was, it drew critical acclaim.