NEW YORK, Oct. 4 (UPI) -- Big Mouth creator and voice actor Nick Kroll said Season 3 of his puberty-themed, animated comedy addresses the MeToo movement and features guest appearances by the Queer Eye guys.
The latest episodes begin streaming on Netflix Friday and viewers can expect to see Kroll's teen character Nick further influenced by his new female hormone monster Connie in Season 3.
"This season was the first season we wrote after MeToo took hold. So, a lot of this season is the kids struggling with living in a post-MeToo world where women and girls are fed up and angry and men are trying to understand how to deal with their masculinity," Kroll told reporters at New York Comic Con on Thursday.
"Because he has a female hormone monster, he is trying to navigate where he fits inside of all of that."
The topic is also addressed in an episode where a school musical version of the 1994 Demi Moore-Michael Douglas movie Disclosure is staged.
"It worked well because Disclosure is this story about women weaponizing sexual harassment and really white, upper middle-class male paranoia," Kroll said. "It ended up being a perfect way into talking about sexual harassment and the conversation that the country and the world has been having."
Kroll separately found a way to integrate the Fab Five from Queer Eye into his raunchy cartoon.
"We just love the show and we thought that Coach Steve would be a funny person to queer eye," Kroll said, noting the athletic director has always appeared to him as "a melon with a mustache."
"We're always like, 'There might be a good-looking guy underneath all that,'" Kroll said.
He knew some of the Queer Eye guys from Netflix events and went through the streaming service's executives to book them for Big Mouth.
"They were immediately on-board," Kroll said. "Trying to coordinate their schedules while they were shooting seasons took a little bit of work, but they were down. They were great."
Unlike many animated projects, Big Mouth allows its voice actors to tape their dialogue together. The show features middle-school-age characters, their teachers, parents and various hormone monsters voiced by Kroll, John Mulaney, Maya Rudolph, Jason Mantzoukas, Jordan Peele, Fred Armisen, Jenny Slate, Andrew Rannells and Jessi Klein.
The lines are frequently so hilarious/ridiculous that the actors have trouble not cracking up. Fortunately, since they are working in animation, the filmmakers can just throw out ruined takes and try again.
"As dirty and, hopefully, funny as the show is, we are also trying to infuse it with as much sentiment and heartwarmingness as possible," Kroll said of the show, which has been renewed for three more seasons.
"I believe recording that stuff together is as useful as the improvising that we do," he said. "There is a humanity that is infused when you are acting opposite someone versus just doing your lines alone in a booth."
