Nick Kroll genuinely does not know what character he's playing in this Smurfs movie

You can watch the panic enter Kroll's eyes as he's asked the hard-hitting question, "Which Smurf are you?"

Nick Kroll genuinely does not know what character he's playing in this Smurfs movie
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As far as “Gotcha!” questions go, “Which Smurf are you?” probably wasn’t intended to be one. And yet, that seems to be exactly how it hit (probable) Smurfs star Nick Kroll when he got asked about his role in the upcoming animated movie on the red carpet this week. It’s genuinely fascinating to observe: You can watch Kroll run through basically every trick in his comedic arsenal to distract or deflect away from the question (at one point, he claims to have written all of Rihanna’s new music for the movie), but Variety‘s Mark Malkin is relentless. Finally, the dam breaks. “I don’t know the character’s name,” Kroll admits with a slightly ashamed laugh. “I genuinely do not know.”

To be fair to Kroll, he wasn’t in Smurfs-promoting mode at the time, having been busy debuting the final season of his Netflix comedy Big Mouth. Still, it really is worth seeking out the video (it’s embedded about halfway down this Variety article) to see a masterclass in trying not to admit that you did like a day of voice work for a quick paycheck several months ago, and have already completely blanked the memory from your mind. Kroll does remember that he’s playing a bad guy in the movie, “part of Gargamel’s crew,” but watching him panic as he realizes he’s probably about to catch an annoyed email from Paramount Pictures’ PR department is a real thing of beauty.

Elsewhere on the red carpet, Kroll revealed some things he did know about, including revealing one visual gag that Netflix asked him to cut from Big Mouth, and which he happily acquiesced to. (It involved blood spurting out of a penis. “It’s the grossest thing. Netflix was like, ‘Could you maybe…’ and we were like, ‘Yeah, we saw.’”) Big Mouth‘s final season debuted on May 23; nobody tell Kroll, but Smurfs hits theaters on July 18.

 
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