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Pete Holmes Biography | Pete Holmes

Pete Holmes(full name: Peter Benedict Holmes) is an American comedian, actor, writer, producer, and podcaster. 

Similarly, he is also known for roles including ‘Crashing’ (2017), ‘College Humor Originals’ (2006), and ‘Don’t Think Twice’ (2016).

Pete Holmes Age

Pete is 39 years old as of 2019. He was born on 30 March 1979, in Lexington, Massachusetts, United States

Pete Holmes Dad

There are no details about his father or Mother

Pete Holmes And Wife | Married

The veteran comedian/television host has been in a blissful marital relationship with a non-celebrity woman called Valerie Chaney since 2017. Chaney is the entertainer’s second wife, as Holmes was formerly married to a woman called Becca.
He got married to his first wife at the age of 22 (which was exactly the year he launched his comedy career), however, the union only survived for six years due to Becca’s extra-marital affair with her current husband simply identified as Rocko. Though events about Pete and Becca’s wedding still remains a secret, their divorce was not, as it left him in a traumatic state for a long time and equally shook his career badly.
Interestingly, the comedian is back in form relationship-wise, having moved on from his failed marriage – many thanks to Chaney who has proved to be his perfect match. On several occasions, Holmes has kept details of his love life out of media’s reach but he sometimes shares a couple of pictures of his second wife on his social media accounts.
The comedian first declared himself and Valerie as a couple on his Instagram page on 17th October 2015, and ever since, he has never shied away from showing the world how precious she is to him. The two share a daughter together who was born in September 2018.

Pete Holmes Personal life

Holmes married Valerie Chaney, whom he refers to as “Sweet Lady Val”, in late 2017. Their daughter, Lila Jane, was born in September 2018. Holmes is a Christian, once having been on the Christian comedy circuit.

Pete Holmes Image

Pete Holmes And His wife Valerie Chaney Photos

Pete Holmes Childhood, Education, and Family

Pete Holmes was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, the United States on March 30, 1979. There is no information regarding his family. He belongs to American nationality and mix (Irish- Lithuanian) ethnicity. His birth sign is Aries. Talking about his education, he attended Lexington High School. Then, he attended Gordon College.

Pete Holmes Career

Holmes has appeared on Comedy Central’s Premium Blend, as a regular panelist on VH1’s Best Week Ever, and on VH1’s All Access. His cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker. In 2010, he performed on John Oliver’s New York Stand Up Show as well as Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. On February 26, 2010, he performed his first television special on the series Comedy Central Presents. On March 21, 2011, and on November 17, 2011, he appeared on the TBS talk show, Conan.
He has provided the voices for several of the characters on Comedy Central’s cartoon Ugly Americans. He was the voice of the E-Trade baby on several television commercials and was also credited as a writer for those commercials.
He wrote for the NBC primetime sitcom Outsourced and also wrote for the Fox sitcom I Hate My Teenage Daughter prior to its cancellation in May 2012.
He released his first album, Impregnated With Wonder, on iTunes on November 15, 2011. In 2013, he released his second album, Nice Try, The Devil.
Holmes has created a popular comedic portrayal of Batman in CollegeHumor’s internet series Badman. He also ran a YouTube channel which was focused around skits alongside Matthew McCarthy called front page films.
He created and stars in the HBO series, Crashing. The pilot was written by Holmes and directed by Judd Apatow. HBO renewed the series for a second season on March 15, 2017.
Holmes is currently writing a book on religion.

Pete Holmes Baby

Pete Holmes’ semi-autobiographical HBO comedy Crashing returns for its third season this Sunday. In honor of the show’s premiere and the birth of his first child in 2018, we sat down with Holmes at L.A. kid emporium The Reckless Unicorn and had him rate a few baby names for us.

Pete Holmes Description of Body Measurement

Talking about his body measurements, Pete has a height of 6 feet 5 inches. Additionally, he weighs is unknown. Similarly, his hair color is dark brown and his eye color is blue.

Pete Holmes Salary and Net Worth

Talking about his net worth and salary, Pete Holmes earns a decent amount of salary. But his net worth is $ 3 million.

Pete Holmes Book

Pete Holmes on his new book, and rediscovering faith. Holmes’ Crashing is a semi-autobiographical HBO series, offering glimpses into the comic’s life after his first wife cheated on him, his relationship with faith was fractured, and he decided to pursue comedy full-time.

Pete Holmes Batman

Holmes portrays the lead character Batman in this parody web series. The series recreates scenes from Christopher Nolan’s Batman films with a comedic twist, such as Batman appearing completely incompetent or sex-obsessed.

Pete Holmes Movies | Film

Year	Title	Role	Notes
2019	The Secret Life of Pets 2	Spot (voice)
2018	Gutbuster	Himself	Post-production
2016	Don’t Think Twice	Pete Holmes
2014	I Am Road Comic	Himself

Pete Holmes Tv Show

Year	Title	Role	Notes
2005	Premium Blend	Himself	Episode: “8.6”
2007	Scott Batman Presents Scott Batman Presents	Earth’s New Robot Overlord (voice)	Episode: “One”
2010–2011	Outsourced		Writer
2010–2012	Ugly Americans	Toby (voice)	20 episodes
2010–2013	John Oliver’s New York Stand-Up Show	Himself	3 episodes
2011	Pete Holmes: Impregnated With Wonder	Himself	Stand-up Special
2011–2012	I Hate My Teenage Daughter		Writer
2013	The Jeselnik Offensive	Himself	Episode 1.9
	Maron	Himself	Episode: “Marc’s Dad”
	Pete Holmes: Nice Try, the Devil	Himself	Stand-up Special
	American Dad!	Toby (voice), Millionaire Matt Davis (voice)	Episode: “Lost in Space” “The Longest Distance Relationship”
2013–2014	The Pete Holmes Show	Himself (host)	Also creator, writer, and executive producer
2014	Mulaney	Trey	Episode: “In the Name of the Mother, and the Son, and the Holy Andre”
2016	Animals.	Patrick (voice)	Episode: “Rats.”
	Pete Holmes: Faces and Sounds	Himself	Stand-up Special
2016–present	Mighty Magic words	Teri Gargantuan, Thaddeus Third well III (voice)	4 episodes
2017	Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero	Ryan (voice)	Episode: “A Tale of Two Wizards”
2017–2019	Crashing	Pete	Also creator, writer, and executive producer
2018	Bob’s Burgers	Connor (voice)	Episode: “Something Old, Something New, Something Bob Caters For You”
	The Simpsons	Matthew (voice)	Episode: “Bart’s Not Dead”
	Pete Holmes: Dirty Clean	Himself	Stand-up Special

Pete Holmes Dirty Clean

 

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Pete Holmes Crashing

Crashing is an American comedy television series created by Pete Holmes and executive produced by Holmes and occasional series director Judd Apatow. The first season aired on the HBO network in the United States from February 19 to April 9, 2017. The semi-autobiographical show revolves around a fictional version of Holmes, a young comedian who pursues a career in stand-up comedy after his wife cheats on him, leaving him homeless. Several comedians play themselves in recurring roles including Artie Lange and T. J. Miller, while others have guest appearances.
After Holmes successfully pitched the idea of the show to Apatow, he completed a script of its pilot episode which HBO picked up for filming in September 2015, with Apatow as director. The success of the pilot led HBO to give the green-light to the first season in January 2016. After four episodes had aired, HBO renewed the series for a second season which premiered on January 14, 2018.
On February 21, 2018, HBO renewed the series for a third season, which premiered on January 20, 2019. On March 8, 2019, Holmes announced on Twitter that Crashing would not be picked up for a fourth season, while also leaving open the possibility that the series would properly conclude with a film adaptation

Pete Holmes Interview

Pete Holmes Show

On August 21 and 23 in 2012, Holmes recorded three episodes of a talk show pilot for TBS, produced by Conan O’Brien, entitled The Midnight Show with Pete Holmes. Holmes’s guests on the unaired pilots included Nick Offerman, Joel McHale, T. J. Miller, and Bill Burr. On February 26, 2013, TBS picked up the show and began airing in late 2013. It showcased “the comedian’s incredible skill set, combining sketches, short films, live comedy, field pieces, and in-studio guest interviews into a fast-paced half hour.” As of July 10, 2013, the name of the show was The Pete Holmes Show. The series premiered on October 28, right after Conan.
The show was picked up for a second season by TBS. On December 9, 2013, Gabe Liedman performed the show’s first-ever stand-up routine. On May 23, 2014, TBS canceled the talk show after two seasons following poor audience ratings. The show ended its run on June 19, 2014.

Pete Holmes Instagram

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Pete Holmes News

Exclusive: Pete Holmes Goes Deep on ‘Crashing’s Cancellation, That Finale, and a Potential Movie

Adopted:http://collider.com
Published: March 10, 2019
45 minutes before I was due to interview Pete Holmes about the Season 3 finale of his HBO series Crashing, news hit that the show was canceled. HBO would not be bringing the charming half-hour comedy back for a fourth season. This was unexpected, to say the least, and admittedly threw me for a loop. I was all primed and ready to dig into that excellent finale episode and John Mulaney’s involvement, and how Holmes and his team crafted the show’s best season yet, and now I was sitting here wondering what kind of mood Holmes would be in, or if the interview would even still happen.
It did, and it turned out to be one of the more engaging and inspiring interviews I’ve had the pleasure of conducting—given the circumstances, of course. Obviously both Holmes and myself would have preferred to see the show continue (he reveals they had already mapped out an outline of Season 4), but the comedian, writer, podcast host, and show creator was refreshingly positive about the whole thing, expressing nothing but gratitude for the three seasons of the show he got to tell.
Of course, it helps that the Season 3 finale ends on such a “finale” note that it really does work magnificently as a series finale—so much so that on set shooting the episode, Holmes says they kept accidentally referring to it as the “series finale.” Pete’s story comes full circle, and he gets a “triple win” as Holmes calls it, ending on a downright swoon-worthy final shot. It’s sad to see such a pleasant, joyful, and surprisingly cathartic show come to an end too soon—Crashing was about far more than just the misadventures of a burgeoning standup comedian, and Holmes and the show’s writers always had a knack for tapping into universal truths about life, love, and happiness. But if the show had to end abruptly, you can’t do much better than the Season 3 finale episode.
So yeah, the interview happened, and what was originally scheduled as a 15-minute chat about the finale suddenly became a 40-minute exit interview about the whole series. I am tremendously grateful to Holmes for being so open and willing to get candid about the show’s cancellation and his feelings on the series as a whole, and I do think the full interview will serve as a minor consolation to fans who are still upset about the show’s cancellation.
During our discussion, Holmes talked about the Season 4 plans they had already outlined, why the surprise series-finale nature of the final episode is fitting, the potential for the story to continue on in a Crashing movie form, and what he’d like to say to fans about the show now that it’s all over. We also dug into the finale episode specifically, including Mulaney’s involvement and getting to play with the Comeback Kid comedian’s persona, and we touched on the crafting of the third season as a whole—including why the inclusion of Kat was so personal to Holmes. We also, of course, talked about that final shot, and what Holmes foresees as the future for Pete and Ali.
Again I’d like to express gratitude to Holmes for being so open and even just willing to talk mere minutes after the cancellation went public, and as a fan of the show and Holmes’ comedy, I do hope to see him back in front of the camera soon. Check out the full interview below, which does contain spoilers for the series finale episode, “Mulaney.”
As a big fan of the show, I have to say I’m really not crazy about the fact that you weren’t picked up for Season 4.
PETE HOLMES: What if I didn’t know? What if you just told me? (Laughs)
Luckily I saw your tweets beforehand!
HOLMES: No, I appreciate that, and I’m happy to be talking to you as the first interview about it.
For three seasons, it’s been this kind of special show that’s feels, I don’t know if niche is the right word, but a show that’s been really beloved, and it was kind of neat to see the outpouring of support I’ve seen on Twitter so far today, of all the people upset over the cancellation.
HOLMES: Yeah, I don’t think the niche is a bad word. I think, when you’re making a show about something that’s already niche, if you do it well, then the show itself should probably be fairly niche. If not entirely niche.
That’s fair. So did you guys already have some plans in mind for Season 4?
HOLMES: Yeah. The way that it works, for all three seasons, is before you get a pickup, there’s this bizarre Black Mirror-ish-like period where you’re writing a show that you don’t know if it will exist. Obviously, I think that’s most eerie between maybe the first and second season. As you go, you get a little bit more used to the idea that you’re like, “Oh, we’re just trying to get ahead of ourselves.” A lot of those ideas might not make it to air, but it’s always [producer] Judd [Apatow’s] style and HBO’s style, graciously, to fund us getting ourselves a little bit before the pickup.
So we had the season pretty much outlined, but I’m not just saying this to be—in fact, I’d like to be clear. I’m not saying anything that I’ll tell you during the interview to just be like the positive guy. I think people maybe expect me to be. But I really do feel that there’s something lovely about the way that it ends. Because the fourth season might have dealt with some breaks or different showbiz milestones that frankly don’t happen to most people that are in comedy. The show ending where it’s ending is a little bit more true to the theme, in the sense that the show was always about what it’s like to be a regular comedian and struggling. That’s why it was called Crashing, and as I’ve joked many times, it wasn’t called Flourishing.
So there’s something kind of fitting about how it ends. Think about where he was in the first season. He was living upstate, he was not plugged into his potential, he was certainly not a part of the scene, and he wasn’t very funny. At the end of the third season, he’s funnier, he’s found better relationships, better friendships, he’s figured himself out. But he’s also become a part of the scene, and that’s what getting past at the Cellar represents.
Without sounding too lofty, I always like those finales that made people talk, that remain hot in the imagination of the viewer. With the show ending here, one of my first thoughts was, “Oh, now people will talk about, ‘What do you think happens?’” Frankly, “What do you think is gonna happen?” is how most comedians feel for most of our lives. I mean, it’s always just like, we’re going to keep being funny, we’re going to keep doing as many shows as we can, but we never really know what’s going to happen. That makes the finale a little more active than, say, taking Pete into the next phase of Hollywood, which was always interesting and was something that I wanted to do, or was open to doing, certainly. There’s something about this finale that feels eerie in how appropriate it is for the show we were making.
I have to be honest. I finished the final episode, and then I went to Google to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I was like, “Did they announce that they were only doing three seasons?” Because it does feel like an ending. It feels like a nice sweet moment. I am so happy it ends that way, with a win for Pete, because I love this character so much. It would’ve been such a bummer if this season ended on a down note.
HOLMES: Oh, I really appreciate it. I mean, it’s a triple win. I mean, he goes up after Mulaney. A lot of times on Crashing, we do things both ways. We’d shoot maybe me doing well, and me doing poorly. Let’s say the script said that I do poorly. We might shoot one take where it goes well, just to have the option when we’re editing, just in case we want to mix it up or something. It was always scripted that Pete goes up and does well after Mulaney.
That set that I do there is something that Judd and I beat out. It seems very loose, but it was pretty scripted, maybe not the jokes, but the areas I was going to touch on were very scripted, and then I riffed around them. Judd gave me those beats, but it was not like, “Let’s also shoot him peeing his pants,” just to kind to have that. We didn’t even consider it. We were like, “He goes up after Mulaney. The table is set for it to be a disaster, and then he does really well.” Then Mulaney, who we’ve we established in two seasons now is only ever unkind to Pete, then turns on him. That’s a real phenomenon in the comedian world, when you see someone be funny, especially brazenly or bravely funny, the way Pete is, sort of making fun of John, that can make a friendship. And then he wins at the Cellar, obviously. Which, the whole season, it was one of the more orchestrated seasons that we ever did. Meaning we bookended it with failure, and then, mirroring that failure with a success, and then, obviously, what happens with him in the last couple frames. It’s something that we don’t normally do.
I don’t know if you saw my tweet, but when we were shooting, the director is Gillian Robespierre, and we kept accidentally calling it the series finale. I mean like more than 10 times. It just kept happening, and then we’d all go, “No, no, no, it’s not the series finale,” but it’s because of exactly what you’re picking up on.
So when I found out that it wasn’t coming back, obviously the first thing you do is, you wonder how your work is going to land. How’s it going to feel in those last moments? Immediately, I was filled with the relief that I was like, “Oh, my God. It always felt like a series finale,” and then I was like, “People are gonna think that we went back and re-edited it,” which, because you already saw it, you know that we didn’t. But when you watch it, people are going to be like, “Oh, that feels like the ending.” I mean, there could be a movie or something, we’re certainly open to that. But if this were it, it would just be like, “Oh, wow. That’s nice. Thank you for that.”
It sucks that it’s not coming back, but I’ve been a fan of the show since day one, and I felt this was your strongest season yet. I loved the introduction of Kat. Even just the structure of the season, I thought, just played out really perfectly. So if you have to go out unexpectedly, I’m glad it went out this way.
HOLMES: You know, you’re really just mirroring my own feelings. When you’re a standup— Kumail Najiani and I started together, and we would go and do stand-up gigs, and sometimes, those gigs would be canceled. We’d get there, and there’d be no audience. When you’re starting out in comedy, one of the things that Crashing is about is that you pretend that you love standup even though you don’t yet, because you’re not good at it. I remember being outside of a club, Kumail was smoking—10 years ago, he smoked, which is really funny because he’s so fit now. But he was smoking outside the club and I was like, “I feel guilty admitting this to you,” because especially new comedians just never want to show weakness, but I was like, “I’m a little relieved that the standup show is canceled.” Kumail was like, “Yeah. Now it can’t go badly.” I was like, “Oh, that’s it! You’re right.”
So there’s sort of this feeling that the third season, we hit a stride. Obviously, the addition of Madeline Wise, which was something where I felt very close to that character and felt very locked in writing that character with the room and with Judd and everybody. To go out this season, where I was getting the most phone calls and texts, and just running into people that I admire, and having them tell that they love the show, I was like, “That is how you go about being a cult classic.”
I think of Togetherness, for example, which was another HBO show that was short-lived. I love that show, and there’s a special warm cozy feeling you get when there’s a show that has a lifespan like this, that you found and that you appreciated.
Definitely. Well, this season found Pete wearing a lot of different hats, both literally and figuratively.
HOLMES: (Laughs) Yeah!
He’s trying to figure out where he fits in. So he tries the college tours, he tries the religious angle, and he’s like, “Maybe this is what I’m supposed to be doing,” and I love that it ends with, “No. Standup comedy at the Cellar, this is my calling, this what I’m meant for, this what I’m good at.” How did you guys go about crafting that specific arc for the season?
HOLMES: Well I think Pete is certainly a complicated character—the version of myself on the show, just like me, is complicated. But one of the things that I enjoyed knowing at his core was that he just wanted to be accepted by the scene. He just wanted to be given a platform to do the thing that he really loved to do. You’ll see that throughout movies and TV shows. A lot of times, characters we like, a cliché network note is, “Can they be good at their job?” Which really just means, “Can they have a purpose, and can they be effective and single-minded in their pursuit of that purpose?”
So Pete is really playing a game of what’s expected of him, and what you want. Which, by the way, is the theme of my favorite show of all time, which is Mad Men. The feeling of what’s expected of you versus what you really want. They say that many, many times and Pete is also figuring that out. It’s like, am I supposed to be the enthusiastic warmup guy that can do colleges, and give people what they want? Can I do the religious market, cash in on that unique upbringing, and that experience, and that worldview?
I love when he says to Fudge—Fudge is the comedian at the end of the Christian tour—he just goes, “I belong in the fields, talking about asses.” He’s saying that he figured out that even though he might have some cognitive dissonance, he might not be completely at peace with who he really is. He is saying, “My job is to figure out who that is, and I need to be in a place where I’m allowed to express my ugliness, or my doubt, or my selfishness, or my narcissism, or my horniness, or my selfishness, whatever it might be,” and the Christian market wasn’t that for him, and the college market wasn’t that for him. And then at the end of the day, and this is one of the things that makes comedians interesting, I think, is his happy place is a very small, off-center, unbalanced cellar. It’s a basement where there are people pointed in his direction and a microphone, and lights, and being able to do that work is his happy place.
There’s something that was cut out of the third season, which was we shot Pete and Kat going on the subway, and her making him miss the train because she couldn’t find her Metro card and all these different things. We had to cut it for time, which is unfortunate. Because that was something that I really wanted to show, which was that he was sort of exorcizing his anger. He did a joke about something that was frustrating to him, and something that’s kind of ugly. Ugly in the loose sense. Ugly, meaning, “it’s not polite to think your girlfriend is annoying and slows you down,” right? Then he gets into the Cellar by venting that honesty, and that is a win that’s not like what we might have done in the fourth season, like a big showbusiness world. That’s an internal transformative emotional win, and it’s also a showbusiness win, to be able to play the greatest club in the country.
You and Judd have both mentioned a potential Crashing movie. Would that be following him, then, into the ideas that you had planned for season four, of his kind of rising in showbiz?
HOLMES: You know, I haven’t spoken explicitly with Judd or our showrunner, Judah [Miller], or our producer, Oren [Brimer], or any of the writers about this yet. My feeling would be, if we did a movie, I don’t know if it would necessarily be a one-hour or a 90-minute version of the fourth season. My feeling would be because it wraps up so cleanly, it would have to be almost like a standalone. Like what they did with Hello Ladies. It would have to be standalone. An idea that lights me up more would be, “Well, what is something that you wouldn’t expect? Not just a Reader’s Digest version of the fourth season, but what opportunities are there to tell a story with the characters that I love, and that the audience has enjoyed? How can we tell a unique story?”
So I would look at it—and this is just me today. This could change tomorrow, but I would look at it and be like, “Is there a weird story we can use, building off of the characters that we’ve established, rather than listening to a podcast at 1.5 speed, and trying to rush through our idea for the fourth season?” I think it would be more, like, just talking to you today would be like: “Oh, Pete and Lief go on a road trip to LA,” or something. I don’t know, but it would be something more like that. Or at least, that’s what it would do for me.
But, a little glimpse into our process, that’s not the final word. This show was so much Judd and my show, and the writers and the producers. It was very, very collaborative, and there was no, “Pete says that we’re gonna do it.” I would pitch things to Judd, and he would refine them and tweak them, and lovingly change them, and that’s one of the reasons why the show was so successful. If it had just been me, I mean, there would have been so much more masturbation (laughs).
Listen, I’m fine with that. Those jokes are funny.
HOLMES: Yeah anything that’s weird or sort of like, “Uh-oh,” I just gravitate towards that. Judd would steer me away from two things: anything that was overtly a little bit too indulgent. Like, literally indulgent, like too many jerks off scenes. Or he was also very good at almost like trimming a bonsai tree. He would clip out any time that I got a little too on the nose talking about philosophy or spirituality or Zen Buddhism. I was always having Lief quote Alan Watts for 10 minutes, and Judd would always be like, “I appreciate that. I like that, but this is a comedy show, and it’s only half an hour, so let’s keep it moving.” Which, honestly, and I’m not just saying this to plug the book, but that’s why I wrote a book. Comedy Sex God comes out in May, and that’s what happens when it’s just me alone, and you’ll see that that book is filled with masturbation and filled with a lot of Alan Watts.
Well, you’ve sold me. I can’t wait to read it. I wanted to ask about Mulaney. Number one, is he a dick? And number two, how do you go about crafting that persona onscreen? Because it’s so good. I think that finale may be one of your best episodes.
HOLMES: I completely agree, and it’s funny with people like Mulaney and literally almost every cameo we have, pick any cameo. Whitney Cummings, Sarah Silverman, Bill [Burr], anybody. They were the embodiment of the spirit of Crashing, which is, none of these people needed to be on our show, you know what I mean? Sarah Silverman does not need to be on our show, and Mulaney does not need to be on our show. But the idea of Crashing is that comedian friends to help each other. Sometimes, comedians call bullshit on that, and I’m like, “Well, if that’s not your experience, you’re hanging out with the wrong ones. Mix up your group, right?”
As much as we want to make it alone, you can’t make it alone. So Mulaney obviously is not a dick. He’s an incredible sweetheart, but as someone also who is—it’s sort of weird to talk about yourself, but I am viewed as a positive, bright writer-comedian. Like, a more friendly comedian, a sweeter guy, just like Mulaney is. So I think he and I share the same fascination with tearing down those ideas, rather than leaning into them when the opportunity presents itself.
When we were like, “We wanna write, almost like a Curb …” Like, Larry David, his character on Curb is him if he said what he was really feeling if he was really fearless and just didn’t care what people thought about him. That is sort of what we’re doing with Mulaney, and in some cases, it’s what we’re doing with my character, just less so. It’s like, “Okay, everyone knows he’s a sweetie, but even sweeties …” As I say in my podcast all the time, “The kindest, most gentle nun occasionally has weird thoughts, where they’re just like, ‘I fuckin’ hate Jews,’ for no reason.” They just flare up in the morning when they’re eating their waffle. They’re just kind of passive. That’s not their identity, but they still have those thoughts. But I’m always interested in taking a sweet character like John, and so is he, and turning up the volume on those thoughts and those feelings that everybody has, that just don’t necessarily have a hold of his identity or his personality. Also, it’s just really funny. I mean, Mulaney as a dick is one of my greatest achievements.
It’s brilliant. The whole “But they don’t know I’m a dick” thing.
HOLMES: You know what? He was riffing so much in that. He riffed so much in that, and I’d be remiss, especially since this is one of the last interviews I’ll do about Crashing, at least directly. Rachel Feinstein in 307, she’s riffing that stuff about ghosting, and Amy Schumer riffed all of her jokes about my hair, and so did Joyelle and Lynn. Everybody in that scene is riffing.
And Mulaney, impossibly—one of the things that I so admire about him, and anybody that knows him knows this is true, is he just speaks in perfectly formed jokes. He’s just like a running comedy faucet. So when we go, “Okay, Pete is about to open for you. We have these jokes written for you,” and he says those as well, but we were also just like, “What would you say?” So the riffs the thing about, “My parents are here. You have to be dirty, so I look clean.” I’m sure in the script it said something like, “Don’t be dirty,” and he took that to be like, “No, be dirty, so I can be clean.”
The fact that HBO gave us a production schedule shooting on film, which is insane, that allowed for long days where we could do multiple takes, and let the cameras run. I mean, on digital, who cares? But when you’re burning money, literally, every second that you’re sort of playing around, it takes an amazing producer like Igor Srubshchik, who was incredible about giving us that freedom, and obviously Judd was very protective in making sure that we had that sort of room to play. That’s where you get moments like Mulaney being so, so funny, and Mulaney in the second season, when he’s talking about, “Break into my apartment and follow me home,” and all that stuff. It’s 100% riffing. If you look closely, you can tell I’m trying very hard not to laugh.
I did want to ask about Kat, because that, I felt, was a really great and complex addition to the season, and Madeline Wise’s performance is outstanding. What went into crafting that character and her relationship with Pete?
HOLMES: Well, it’s very close to my heart, and my real experience. I was very shocked … maybe not shocked, maybe delightfully surprised that countless people, people I know, people I don’t know, people online, that were like, “Holy shit. You just, basically, for the first time put onscreen what it feels like to be in a relationship with someone who might have some unhealthy tendencies. Who seems really great, and is really great—to be honest, she’s great—but has some blind spots.” So I really wanted to show somebody that could really run hot and cold, so she can be so loving, and even more supportive of Pete than he is of himself, and put his picture on the side of a bus. I mean, that is such an indicative moment of who she is, that it’s a little unstable, a little bit frightening, but it’s also really, really kind.
But then, I had a girlfriend do deaf voice to me, and that was not hard for me to get back into that place of shock. But then, what was even more surprising was all the people that were like, “I dated a girl that did something very similar like that,” and the heartbreak that you feel, when you’re in love with somebody that just has, as I say, a blind spot. Or just has a mean side. But if you actually watch Madeline, Madeline is such an amazing actress that she changes how she looks. She changed how she looked somehow! There’s that scene at Stand Up NY where we sort of do our exit interview, and she looks like a ghost. That’s not makeup! She was contorting her face, and her eyes were basically black, like, it was crazy. When shooting that scene with such a talented person, it was not hard for me to flounder. A lot of that was improvised as well. Judd was there that day, and he was like, “Just give her a never-ending flow of bullshit. Don’t tell her the truth. Just tell her that she’s too big for you,” and it was not hard for me to get back into that space of being in love with somebody, but also being really, really afraid of them, as well.
Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, I don’t know, unfortunately for them there’s a lot of people, men, and women, that know what it’s like to be in a relationship with somebody where you’re walking on eggshells, and you don’t know if what you’re going to say is going to make them happy, or is going to make them furious. Pete is such a … I don’t want to say he’s a coward in a bad way, but he’s very non-confrontational, so he does what a lot of people in situations like that do, where he lets his behavior break up with her because he’s too scared to do that directly.
I will say, the filmmaking this season was great, and I think it was Gillian who directed the Seth Meyers episode and also “Mom and Kat.” I got a pit in my stomach. It felt like watching a horror movie, because I was so worried and afraid for Pete, and that came across so well. It was rough to watch.
HOLMES: I appreciate that because it was rough to live things like that. I got in a huge fight with a girlfriend once in the driveway of the parents’ house, where it’s like, you get in a fight, and then you have to go in and act a completely different way. One of the great things about art and television and comedy is that you can take these moments that are literally the low points of your life, whether it be a divorce, or whether it’d be bombing, or whether it’d be a toxic relationship or an infatuation like this. You can take these things that really hurt at the time, and sort of alchemize them into comedy, and that’s very healing for me when I’m doing it. It can be very psychologically difficult for me to do it as well. Ultimately, it’s very healing, and then you release it, and then it’s healing, potentially, for the people who watch it. Because one of the biggest things that I aim or strive to provide is that wonderful feeling of solidarity.
Ideally, when you leave a standup comedy show of mine, or you watch a show that I’ve made or anything that I’ve written, hopefully the people that consume it will laugh and be entertained, but underneath it, I really want people to feel less alone, and just go, “Oh, I’m not the only one.” How often, when we laugh, is it partly because we’re titillated and delighted, but also because we’re relieved because the world is scary and daunting and isolating? And you go, “Oh, it’s happening to millions of us. We’re all kind of going through similar steps, and fumbling over similar obstacles.” That’s a great joy in my life.
Well, I want to say thank you for being so personal, because it comes across. The depiction of being raised an evangelical Christian is one of the truest to life depictions of that I’ve seen and the complexities of that, and I think that specificity somehow makes it universal. So thank you for doing that.
HOLMES: I appreciate that. I think it’s really fascinating, and I’ve experienced this on my podcast. The more specific you are, and the more niche you are, the more people relate. I think that’s one of the most interesting universal paradoxes that I’ve sort of uncovered, which is, you do a show about standup in Crashing, and musicians, or photographers—I had people who were single parents relate to the feeling of struggling to uncover your truth and stuff. We thought we were making a show that was like, “Oh, this will be for the open makers. This will be for the people that are thinking about getting into standup. And it’ll be for evangelicals,” or whatever it might be, and then you end up relating to Mormons. You end up relating to atheists. You end up relating to all these different types of backgrounds. But I think it’s fascinating that the more specific you are, the more universal things can be.
It is. Before you go, is there anything you wanted to say to the fans or about the show as this is all ending?
HOLMES: Well, that’s part of the reason why I’m happy to talk to you. I was like, “Let’s get this all out, and I can Tweet it, and share it, and then have this nice conversation to represent how I’m feeling.” What I would say is what we’ve been saying. When I spoke with HBO about the show not coming back, I talked with Casey Bloys, who’s been incredible the whole time. HBO is just as great as everybody has always said they are, maybe even better than I imagined, and he said that it was a little bit weird, or maybe a nice surprise that all I was feeling was joy and gratitude. That’s completely honest because the process has been so great, because we had the room to make the show that we wanted to make, and the freedom for talent that HBO has always been famous for giving.
So then, to the fans, it’s like, their response, and the way that they’ve supported it, and reached out, and related and sort of interacted with the show and let me know about how they’re feeling, whether it be a person or online or whatever it might be. Or even talking with you about how much you like it when I talk to the press, it’s just been wonderful. It’s a real privilege to be a part of one of those shows. I don’t even want to give it the caveat, “even though it’s ending,” but you can say, “Even though it’s ending, to be a show that people found, that they related to, that they, in their fandom, sort of incubated and allowed to exist.” If they didn’t watch, if they didn’t like it, if they didn’t speak about it, if they didn’t write about it, it wouldn’t have gotten to keep going. So I really just feel grateful to them. I feel sorry for the fans that wanted to keep going, obviously, that wanted to see more.
I know that feeling really well, to fall in love with a show. It’s a relationship. It’s personal. It’s in your house. It’s on at Sunday. Especially a show that airs week by week, it becomes a routine. You’re like, “Oh, there’s a new Crashing, let’s watch it,” and there’s an intimacy there. So I feel sad when I think about breaking that line of communication with them, and I can sometimes feel sad thinking about the great actors and writers that, like, are basically my work family, the people that shot it, the people that edited it.
I mean, I was on set for 14 hours every day, with an edit for 10 hours every day, whatever it was. They became real friends and family to me, so there’s some sadness there. But really, it’s just a feeling of like, “Oh, shit, we did what we wanted to do, and we were hoping it would connect in this way and that way and this way. It did.” So I’m really just kind of walking around feeling a nice warm glow inside, because I’m like, “Oh, that exists, and it continues to exist.” I’ve been joking with my friends. I’m like, “Everybody streams everything, anyway,” and at some point, somebody on HBO GO or whatever is going to click on my goofy face, have no idea what it is, and they’re going to have 24 episodes to watch, however, they want to watch it.