When Nick Kroll and the writers of Netflix’s animated comedy Big Mouth sat down to write Season 2, they made a decision to mostly not include jokes that directly referenced current events. It would take about five months for a team in Korea to turn the season’s illustrations around, and given the breakneck pace of the political news cycle, the writers felt it best to avoid references to Donald Trump that could potentially feel stale down the line.

But there were a select few Trump jokes that felt evergreen enough to keep, since they weren’t tied to specific events or policies.

“We have a joke in one of the episodes that it’s National Pantsing Day,” Kroll explained to In the Limelight co-host Josh Duboff on this week’s episode of the Vanity Fair podcast (the interview with Kroll begins at 20:26 in the episode). “Because it was a big thing in middle school, where kids are pulling down each other’s pants. I think the joke is that the Trump administration had created National Pantsing Day to toughen kids up while keeping things sexy.”

The show does veer into other timely subjects, though. The fifth episode in the new season, for example, features a story line involving Planned Parenthood—an arc developed after Big Mouth co-creators Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett met with Sue Dunlap, the president of the Los Angeles branch of the nonprofit organization. (This past May, Trump announced plans to cut funds for the organization.)

“She basically said, ‘Obviously donations are great, but we at Planned Parenthood really want people to tell stories involving Planned Parenthood,’” said Kroll. “We started talking about it in the room and figuring out, ‘Is there a way to tell a story involving Planned Parenthood with our cast and the kind of stories that we tell?’ As we thought about it, we realized maybe we could take a step out from what we normally do and tell a story that is different from the rest of our episodes. So this one is like five vignettes in different styles of storytelling. There is one that is sort of Star Wars-y, one that is horror-movie genre around S.T.D.s. There’s a story about a woman getting an abortion that’s almost like a music video. There is a Bachelor parody about a girl choosing birth control for family planning. And there’s a story about Elliot (Fred Armisen), Nick’s dad, getting a vasectomy that’s in a sort of Woody Allen–esque style.”

Kroll explained that he and the show’s writers wanted Season 2 to continue grappling with stories of sexuality and puberty, but through the prism of evolving characters. The show’s teenagers develop new feelings, and in turn, the show gets a few new characters.

“I’d say the big thrust of Season 2 for Andrew and the rest of the kids eventually was the Shame Wizard, a new character voiced by David Thewlis,” said Kroll, who said that he happened to be watching the third season of FX’s Fargo when brainstorming the new Big Mouth episodes. “You might know David Thewlis as the villain, bad guy, evil force [V.M. Varga in the latest Fargo season] with his terrible, weird teeth—which are not his teeth. He’s this charming, bizarre, very frightening looming force. When we were writing the Shame Wizard, we were like, ‘Oh, that guy is kind of similar to what we imagined Shame to be in our world.’”


Thewlis agreed to the role, and he makes a menacing impact on the show’s characters this season.

“Shame I think is such an important part of puberty and something that really blossoms in puberty because you’re all of a sudden having these sexual feelings, urges, desires, and actions,” said Kroll. “I think shame comes out of that so much. But then as the season goes on, he starts to haunt other kids for other reasons as well.”

Listen below to hear Kroll’s thoughts on bouncing Big Mouth ideas off his therapist, what a hit he was at his nephew’s bar mitzvah, and the scene last season that Netflix thought went too far. Kroll also teases what to expect in Season 2—including a musical number with Maya Rudolph’s Hormone Monstress, a new character voiced by Jane the Virgin’s Gina Rodriguez, and a Nathan Fillion love triangle—which premieres October 5.
