Here are the facts of how the past four years led him to this peculiar place: In 2020, while living in New York City, he entered rehab, for addiction to cocaine and a smorgasbord of pharmaceuticals. He and his wife, Anna Marie Tendler, split up. He relapsed. He went back to rehab, this time with the help of a starry intervention that has since passed into legend thanks to his Emmy-winning Netflix special, Baby J. This time, the sobriety stuck. Soon after, he connected with Munn and, soon after that, it became known that she was pregnant.
This cascade of revelations about his personal life came as a surprise to fans who thought they knew Mulaney better than they did. Some of those fans freaked out. Parasocial became the word of the moment.
Once Mulaney and Munn decided to raise their son together, Mulaney moved to Los Angeles where, among other things, he eventually produced the six-night fever dream of a talk-show experiment, John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A., 12 new episodes of which are scheduled to air live on Netflix sometime in late February.
Inside the mall, we pass by jewelry and clothing stores; gift shops filled with dragon figurines and bobblehead Buddhas; a food court offering pho, congee, and plates of sea snails in various sauces. We find a bench near a stage with a banner wishing everybody a happy Tet Trung Thu, or Mid-Autumn Festival.
Another metaphor he likes, appropriate for his new Oklahoman family: “It was like a tornado picked me up, head to toe, hip to hip. And I landed somewhere extremely lucky and nice, where I’m having the best time in life.”
Indeed, if this is Oz, it seems to suit him. He has always been handsome, but time and sobriety have both softened and strengthened his features. Gone is the jangled angularity of a character in a hand-cranked Kinetoscope about to break into the Charleston. In its place, an unexpected superhero jaw. His old drug habits, as he describes them, were an exhausting back-and-forth of self-medication for a litany of supposed infirmities, more like biohacking than partying. But when the drugs went, so did the infirmities.
“There was a time when I would have told you that I could not fly, sleep, or perform unless I had a Klonopin,” he says. “I thought I had serious light sensitivity onstage. Spotlights had to be at a super-low grade. The front row had to be lit, because I thought I had a spatial…not vertigo, but something like that. I would have said, ‘It sucks, because I don’t always want to take Klonopin and Xanax, but I have to.’ ”
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