Nick Kroll

The heir who preferred the basements

Nick Kroll was born in New York City in 1978 into an immense fortune. His father founded Kroll Inc., one of the most powerful research and risk consulting firms on the planet. But the family's youngest son preferred open mics and offbeat voices to the Wall Street offices.

In 2004 he started working the city's stand-up circuit. He didn't seek validation from the traditional system because he already had financial backing at home. That allowed him the luxury of failing until he found a voice of his own.

Nick Kroll never needed the money.

This freedom allowed him to take risks with characters who bordered on the repulsive. In 2009 he joined the cast of The League. There he played Ruxin, a lawyer obsessed with fantasy football who embodied modern selfishness. The show ran for seven seasons and gave him the platform he needed to launch his own outrageous creations.

The lab of a thousand faces

Sketch comedy gave him full creative control in 2013 with Kroll Show. Over three seasons, he dissected American reality TV culture. He built an interconnected universe where characters jumped from one fictional show to another without warning.

And the bet paid off because he understood the language of trash TV.

In 2017, Kroll's career changed scale with the premiere of Big Mouth. The animated series is based on his own puberty and that of his friend Andrew Goldberg. It was a massive hit for how it handled taboo topics like masturbation and menstrual anxiety.

The series went on to run for eight confirmed seasons. Kroll voices more than a dozen characters, including Maurice the Hormone Monster. But his main work lies in the narrative architecture of a project that often tackles adolescence with unprecedented bluntness.

Because adult humor on television needed a new generation.

Breaking away from the comedy mold

His move into dramatic film came sporadically. In 2016 he appeared in Loving, a film about civil rights in the United States. He played Bernie Cohen, the lawyer who took the interracial marriage case to the Supreme Court. It was a dry, restrained performance that surprised critics of the time.

In 2022 he was part of the cast of Don’t Worry Darling under the direction of Olivia Wilde. The production was surrounded by outside controversies that overshadowed the acting work. Kroll kept a low profile during the promotion at that year's Venice Film Festival and avoided getting caught up in the media noise surrounding his colleagues.

In 2023, he revived Mel Brooks' spirit with History of the World, Part II. He wrote, produced, and starred in this sequel to the 1981 classic. The project grew to eight episodes for the Hulu platform, with a budget that allowed for recreating multiple historical eras.

His father's company was sold for 1,900 million dollars in 2004.