Nick Kroll

Nick Kroll spent the late 2000s as a reliable supporting comic presence in studio comedies, turning up in Get Him to the Greek, I Love You, Man, Date Night and Dinner for Schmucks in the sort of role that gets three good lines and leaves. The real career began when he started writing his own material. The League ran from 2009 to 2015, and Kroll Show, which he created and starred in from 2013, established what he actually does.

What he does is characters. Kroll builds people out of a voice and a very specific delusion, usually a man convinced he is winning a conversation he has already lost. That is the engine of Big Mouth, which he co-created and has run since 2017, and where he voices a large fraction of the cast including a thirteen-year-old version of himself. It is an unusually thoughtful show about puberty hiding inside an extremely crude one, and Human Resources followed it into the same universe.

Animation has become his main film work: Gunter in Sing, Sergei in The Secret Life of Pets 2, Uncle Fester in the Addams Family films, and the least printable role in Sausage Party. The interesting development is elsewhere. He is quietly good in dramatic parts, where Loving, Operation Finale and Knight of Cups all use his ordinariness rather than his voice, and he is better in them than a comedian of his type is expected to be.