Big mouth s2 shame wizard
“This was also kind of inspired by Brené Brown,” Goldberg said. The characters get isolated and lash out at each other in response, not realizing until late into the season that the same creature is tormenting all of them. And so, the Shame Wizard would manipulate each character by finding their specific anxieties - Andrew’s shame about masturbating, Jessi’s shame over her parents’ divorce - and making them feel responsible. Guilt is, I did a bad thing, shame is, I am a bad thing,” Goldberg said. “Guilt is, I made a mistake, shame is, I am a mistake. Key to developing the concept of the Shame Wizard, in the writers’ minds, was the distinction between shame and guilt. There, the show’s writers started digging into the mechanics of shame, relying in a large part of the research of Brené Brown, who has done research on the concept of vulnerability and given a TED Talk on the subject. Separate from the Shame Wizard’s look was figuring out how the character would actually behave. “We were like, David has such an interesting face maybe should look more like him,” Goldberg said, so much so that the first time they showed Thewlis a sketch of the character, “He was like, ‘Is that me?’” That includes the look of the Shame Wizard himself, who appears as a spectral being akin to the Dementors in Harry Potter - and whose introduction comes in a scene where he puts Andrew on trial, recalling the wizarding world’s Ministry of Magic. “Once we had him and his voice, it became a nice cycle where he inspired different ideas for different character,” Goldberg said. The writing staff nicknamed Thewlis “the charm wizard,” given how easy he was to work with. “That’s how we got the idea of asking David to do it, and fortunately he said yes.” “He’s a villain, but he’s charming at times, and repulsive at times, and shame is the smartest person in the room,” Goldberg said. “Because shame is clever and tricky and needles its way into you.”Īs it happened, many of the show’s writers were watching the third season of FX’s Fargo, where David Thewlis plays a conniving villain, and they latched onto his performance as the embodiment of the character they were writing. “He was like, ‘No, shame is not a monster, shame is a wizard,’” Goldberg said. A few days later, he suggested that enemy be a “shame monster,” which co-creator Nick Kroll modified from monster to wizard.
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“I wrote on our whiteboard, the Hormone Monster needs a mortal enemy,” Goldberg recalled. The Shame Wizard’s origin story is pretty simple: After the show’s first season played with the idea of hormonal chaos embodied by various Hormone Monsters (voiced by Kroll and Maya Rudolph), Goldberg thought they should explore the other side of that experience. They assume that if it’s secretive and we’re quiet about it, there’s something wrong with it.” “I think an unintended consequence of that is they feel shameful about it. “Our culture is uncomfortable talking to teenagers about sexuality, so we try to avoid it,” co-creator Andrew Goldberg told Vulture about their inspiration for the Shame Wizard. Voiced by David Thewlis at his spookiest, the Shame Wizard creeps into the minds of Nick (Nick Kroll), Andrew (John Mulaney), Jessi (Jessi Klein), Missy (Jenny Slate), and all the other kids, convincing them that their secret hormonal desires are dark and wrong, a notion Big Mouth itself tries to combat by way of songs about boobs. Nowhere is that more apparent than with season two’s introduction of the Shame Wizard, a devious British ghoul who inflicts self-doubt and self-hatred upon the teenage heroes. As much as Netflix’s coming-of-age animated comedy Big Mouth is filled with clever jokes about sex and puberty, it’s also about the darker, most embarrassing aspects of growing up.