Back when Nick Kroll was in college at Georgetown, he took an internship at his dad’s company: Kroll, Inc., the granddaddy of corporate intelligence firms. If it went well, he would join the family business, starting as an entry-level researcher and working his way up the ladder.
Things did not go as planned.
“I was not good at it,” he told Yahoo Finance’s Jen Rogers. “I just was not very good at that stuff. I've really been not very good at anything except comedy.”
So he shifted gears. Today, Nick Kroll sits atop a very different kind of Kroll, Inc: a comedy empire that is red-hot and continues to grow. He is the co-creator of the critically acclaimed animation series “Big Mouth” on Netflix, which just began Season 3 and has already been renewed for three additional seasons. He has a new spin-off series, “Human Resources,” in the works for Netflix. And he’s the voice of Uncle Fester in the new “Addams Family” film, which opens nationwide today.
All of this, after his hit sketch television series, “The Kroll Show” which ran for two years on Comedy Central, and his innovative Broadway revue “Oh Hello,” which he staged in 2016-2017 with his college buddy and comedy soulmate John Mulaney.
Like father, like son
“I think my dad sees me very much as an inheritor of what he did,” Kroll said. “He sees what I do and what my friends do as incredibly entrepreneurial -- that we, as artists, are creating products that we have to build from the ground up and figure out a way to sell on a grander scale.”
Right now, he’s selling out theaters across the country for his stand-up “Middle-Aged Boy Tour.”
Kroll is a long way from that cubicle at his father’s firm, and he couldn’t be happier about it: “I can't imagine doing anything else because as soon as I started doing comedy, all of the busy work around it felt doable,“ he said. “And I was like, if it feels like the busy work is not a problem, then this feels like the field I want to be in.”
Nick Kroll was featured on My Three Cents with Jen Rogers, a weekly interview series that explores celebrities’ history with — and relationship to — money and work. Find it exclusively on Yahoo Finance.
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