John Mulaney is opening up about the intervention his friends staged for him.
It was revealed back in 2020 that the 40-year-old comedian had checked into rehab for his cocaine and alcohol addiction. He completed treatment in February 2021 – and his been sober since then.
Now, in his new comedy special on Netflix titled John Mulaney: Baby J, John revealed that he was using cocaine heavily before a group of 12 of his friends in the comedy community gathered in person in NYC and on Zoom. The gathering was under the guise of “dinner with a friend from college” but they were actually staging an intervention for him.
Many of those friends who were at the intervention included very famous comedians.
He said in his Netflix special:
“Let me just call this out now, I don’t mean to be weird. It was a star-studded intervention. It was, like, a good group.
It was a good group. As mad as I was when I walked in there, I was like, this is a good lineup, this is really flattering in its own way.”
He jokingly said:
“It was like a ‘We Are The World’ of alternative comedians over the age of 40. All comedians.
Yet no one said a funny thing the entire night.”
John went on to share how he felt that evening about what his friends were doing:
“I was going psychotic. I am sitting there in an awful chair, crashing from cocaine. No one will let me go to the bathroom to freshen up and the funniest people are staring at me, refusing to do jokes. It was maddening.
I was so mad that night. They had tricked me. I mean, at its core, an intervention is a prank. They had pranked me. They were trying to tell me what to do with my life, they were trying to control me. They were sending me away to rehab for months.
I felt powerless. I felt very angry.”
Looking back now, however, John shared that he feels grateful for his friends who helped him towards sobriety:
“Getting to do this show, and standing here, listen, I am grateful to everyone at my intervention.
They intervened. They confronted me and they totally saved my life.”
Here is a list of some very famous names in attendance at his intervention:
Fred Armisen
Nick Kroll
Bill Hader
Seth Meyers
Natasha Lyonne
