‘Oh, Hello on Broadway’: Nick Kroll and John Mulaney Talk Woody Allen and Age Makeup

The Broadway debut of Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland is long, long overdue — at least according to Gil and George, the 70-something Upper West Siders played by Nick Kroll and John Mulaney. After winning a following for the old guys in recurring skits on Comedy Central’s “The Kroll Show” and in a buzzy Off Broadway run last year, Gil and George’s Broadway bow, “Oh, Hello on Broadway,” opens tonight. They sat down with Variety to talk Woody Allen, age makeup, and tuna.

The program says Gil and George’s understudies are Jon Hamm and John Slattery. Will they be there opening night?
JOHN MULANEY: Well, understudies don’t normally get invited to openings.
NICK KROLL: But Hamm, sure, if he can buy a ticket.
JM: Also, George and Gil may bail on opening night because it’s too Hollywood.
NK: It’s a Monday, which they were told is when they’re supposed to be dark.
JM: And also they play — well, they don’t play clarinet at Cafe Carlyle on Monday nights, Woody Allen does. But they wait outside and throw potatoes at him.

What’s involved in turning you both into senior citizens?
NK: It’s about 40 minutes of makeup all-in. Each.
JM: It’s facial hair, eyebrows, face, capillaries, liver spots.
NK: Annamarie Tendler Mulaney, our makeup guru, is outlining the veins and adding liver spots on our hands. With the amount of lights we have on Broadway, we get washed out. So there’s more makeup.
JM: There’s more truth to these men. Nick and I get to stare into each other’s true old faces.
NK: When George gets angry, I can see the spreading of a lifetime of alcoholism bursting in the capillaries across his face.
JM: A lifetime of gentile alcoholism.
NK: And he looks at me and see a lifetime of eczema face.
JM: Eczema, too much sun and cured meats.

Your costumes look like they came from a thrift shop.
JM: They’re not new garments. And they’re not all men’s clothes.
NK: Gil wears a ladies’ shirt, and he’s really settled into a particular brand. He insists on that. People dress up as George and Gil, for Halloween and stuff, and there’s almost no character that’s easier to dress up as. You can just get the clothes where they shop, which is the Salvation Army.
JM: Or, before the estate sale, you go to your dead grandpa’s house and grab a few George items.

Gil and George’s recurring gag, “Too Much Tuna,” involves serving a giant tuna sandwich to your special guest stars, who’ve included Seth Meyer, Will Forte, Natasha Lyonne and Bobby Cannavale. How much tuna is in those things?
NK: The actual sandwich right now is three pounds of tuna. We’ve had a few people wanting to eat it, but we’re concerned about lawsuits. Bill Hader [one the show’s previous special guests] ate a bunch of it in L.A., and then he kind of spit it into my mouth.
JM: He bit into it, and you saw the look in his eye of, “Wait, how long has this tuna been here?” And he chased it with water.
NK: And then he kind of emptied it from his mouth into my mouth.

Ew.
JM: We used to drink tuna-tinis onstage, sir.
NK: Every week.
JM: It was water and loose tuna fish, in martinis glasses that we would bring to Rififi [the East Village comedy club where the characters originated] from Nick’s apartment on 13th St. Barely wash them, then fill them with water and tuna meat. And we would go, “To your health, to my health” — tink — and then we would drink it and eat some of the tuna and go, “Mm, you can really taste the tuna.” That was the big climax of the show.
NK: Then we started doing Clamhattans and drinking clams. We did a Snausages cocktail one time.
JM: That one was actually really gross.
NK: But I am now legitimately allergic to tuna.

So no more drinking tuna-tinis for you.
NK: Well, we don’t have to anymore. We’ve actually written jokes this time.

Did you always imagine “Oh, Hello” on Broadway?
NK: Neither of us ever thought we’d ever be on Broadway. But now that we’re here, we’re like, “Oh, now we’re in showbusiness.” This feels like showbusiness.
JM: We were walking down Eighth Avenue the other night, and we looked at that strip of theaters on 45th Street, the Golden, the Schoenfeld, the Jacobs, and we were like, that’s the most glamorous thing. Way more glamorous than a trailer in Burbank at six in the morning.

After a performance, how long does it take you to get out of your costumes and wash off all the makeup?
JM: That’s fast. But it’ll take years to get out of character.

Where do Gil and George go next?
JM: We’re pretty sure we’re going to get asked to do the Macy’s Day parade. I think, right?
NK: They’re getting rid of the Dilbert floats and adding us in.
JM: And our dialogue will be a track that we sing to.
NK: That’s the goal.
JM: And the moon. A terrible movie where they go to the moon.
NK: They’re trying to convince Elon Musk to let them open up Space X. Of course they don’t even know who he is. They think Elon Musk is a new cologne.

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