Jason Mantzoukas has barely left his house in nine months and he has the massive pandemic beard to prove it. Yes, the beard has always been impressive, but it’s never been quite like this.
During a recent Netflix event to promote the fourth season of Big Mouth—a hilariously strange Zoom meditation guided by the show’s two main hormone monsters—Mantzoukas’ friend and frequent collaborator Nick Kroll referred to him as a “hermit.” Yep, he agrees, that description is pretty accurate.
“I have really, for better or worse, erred on the side of being a shut-in for all intents and purposes,” Mantzoukas tells me from his closet during this week’s episode of The Last Laugh podcast. “I live alone. This is, in a lot of ways, my personal worst-case scenario. It would be as if you had a crippling fear of flying and then were in a plane crash.”
That’s because the comedian has been plagued by various health problems for his whole life, including his well-documented allergy to eggs that could kill him at any moment. “I already feel susceptible to germs, colds, viruses, all this stuff,” he says. “So for me, I have, to be quite honest, overcompensated.” He’s avoided all but the most distanced, masked social gatherings and hasn’t been inside a store since March.
When I ask if his friends think he’s overreacting, Mantzoukas replies, “Very much so. And they’re not wrong.” But he counters with, “If everybody did what I’m doing for six weeks, this thing would be so close to gone.”
Fortunately for Mantzoukas, who first gained widespread recognition for playing the “unhinged” Rafi on The League before stealing scenes on Modern Family, Parks and Recreation, Transparent and dozens of other TV and film comedies, he has been able to keep nearly as busy as ever without ever leaving his house.
He has been recording voiceover for shows like Big Mouth, on which he plays the magic-loving sexual deviant Jay Bilzerian, and other secret animated projects that he’s not allowed to talk about yet from home, as well as taping episodes of his popular podcast about crazy movies, How Did This Get Made?, with friends Paul Scheer and June Diane Raphael. “I’ve been very lucky that a lot of that work has been able to continue throughout this miserable nine-month period,” he says.
Even as other actors have returned to filming live action projects with extra COVID precautions in place, Mantzoukas has stayed away. “I’ve been offered things that I’ve said no to, just because I don’t feel safe on a set,” he reveals. Still, he adds, “It’s really weird to ‘go to work,’ but when I’m done click off the computer and walk out of my closet and I’m just in my house.”
When he used to go outside, Mantzoukas would go on long hikes with Big Mouth’s co-creator Kroll before each new season to talk about where the writers were taking his character. “It’s always exciting to be on those hikes and hear, ‘We're considering that Jay will realize his bisexuality this season,’” he says. “And I was like, I love that.”
“This is incredible that you’re going to take this kid who is this horny little monster and you’re going to really open him up,” he continues. “Because in those early seasons he was so clearly focused on just like pounding out that pillow. And so to give him a broader perspective on himself has been really fun and wonderful.”
Highlights from our conversation are below and you can listen to the whole thing right now by subscribing to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
On getting typecast as a ‘maniac’ after ‘The League’
“I am known for playing a lot of crazy, wild-eyed maniac characters. I happen to play a very good maniac. I’d been playing a version of Rafi for a while. So I was like, I would like to come into your show as unbridled id—a man who is just consuming anything and everything in his path. And they were like, great, let’s do it! And so for me, that was a real moment because people saw that role and then almost immediately I started getting more work as an actor in similarly unhinged performances. And there definitely are roles that I did or took in order to kind of deviate from that. There’s stuff that I’ve done, certainly, that attempts to get away from that. But also, like with Jay on Big Mouth, there is real joy for me in playing characters who have no governors or who have no limits or who have no filters. There’s something wonderful about playing characters who can just exercise their emotions, their vulnerabilities, their feelings at any point in time.”
On the controversy around white actors voicing Black cartoon characters
“It’s such an interesting conversation right now. I’ve played a lot of other ethnicities, mostly because people will only cast me as other ethnicities. I’m in this weird middle ground where I won’t be considered for the white lead role. I had a casting director sit me down once and say, ‘You’re not white enough to be the lead, but you’re also not an actual ethnicity to be cast as a diversity hire.’ So she’s like, you’re not going to get hired anywhere, you’re going to fall through all the cracks. I don’t appear to be what people consider as a traditional ‘white-guy role.’ What I look like is a traditional diversity hire role, but I am in fact not that. So this is where we get into a whole conversation about race and what all this means that’s a very strange and uncomfortable conversation to be having. But yeah, that role in The Dictator, should that role have been played by somebody of Middle Eastern descent? Probably. But once you start pulling the string of that sweater, at a certain point, The Dictator just can’t be made in the way it’s envisioned as a vehicle for Sacha Baron Cohen and his particular brand of humor.”
On recording his ‘Big Mouth’ sex scenes with Nick Kroll
“Those were hilarious, Nick and I in a booth doing Lola and Jay sex scenes, just crying laughing. We’ve been performing together for so, so long. So it really is a delight to get to do stuff with him. And the Lola and Jay storyline, the romance of it—I really loved that story because it gave these two broken, lonely, misfit, melancholy kids a partner. It gave them a teammate, someone they felt seen by. Because they’re both the person in their friend group who is constantly being dismissed, or not thought of, or not invited along. It ends heartbreakingly, yes, but I loved that storyline and it made me really happy for Jay. It’s weird to say, but I’m very fond of him and feel very sad for him at times. So I’m very happy that he found Lola.”
Next week on The Last Laugh podcast: Our special year-end episode featuring the funniest performances of 2020.
