Rachel Zegler, Fred Durst and iMacs

There’s a certain 1990s patina to so much of Kyle Mooney’s work. The decade colors more than a few of the memorable sketches from his Saturday Night Live tenure. Along with the ’80s, it was the focus of his Netflix comedy Saturday Morning All Star Hits. With his new film Y2K, he gives the decade the crescendo it never got.

Y2K, which Mooney directed, co-wrote with Evan Winter and stars in, imagines a turn of the century where the machines don’t just glitch or stop working. They go full homicidal. It’s a horror movie. It’s a comedy. And it’s a rare teen movie set in the era of peak teen movies. (It’s also being distributed by A24, which never hurts.) Mooney has been acting quite a bit since he departed SNL in 2022, but this directorial debut is by far his biggest swing to date. “Even at the SNL, sometimes I’d feel like people expected me to generate my own work,” he says. “I wonder if the industry at large works that way as well. This is fully me projecting, but it works because I do like writing for myself.”

Speaking over Zoom in November during a tour of screenings that took him across the U.S., Mooney talked about navigating nostalgia, casting Rachel Zegler and Fred Durst — yes, that one — and not being able to get Apple on board with killer computers.

The ’90s are a real through line in your work. What was the spark here, the time period or tackling a classic one-party/one-night teen comedy? 

It’s a mix. There are those Easter eggy period things that maybe only those of us who lived through it will catch, but these actors weren’t even alive in Y2K. A lot of people ask us, “What did you tell them? What did you give them?” We gave them playlists for each of their characters and let them choose how much they wanted to invest in learning about the period. Some of those actors didn’t care too much about learning and talking about the culture, but they could relate to the characters. There are versions of those people today. Hopefully, even if you weren’t alive, there is enough universality to the experience of high school life that’s relatable.

What are your favorite teen movies? 

Can’t Hardly Wait is iconic. That and Superbad are pretty ingrained in the DNA of this movie. By the way, the period around the movie, roughly 1998 to 2001, had so many teen comedies. She’s All That, Can’t Hardly Wait, 10 Things I Hate About You, American Pie… some maybe lesser ones, Whatever It Takes, Drive Me Crazy. There was just a tonnage. Our era was represented. In thinking about those movies, which I rewatched while we were writing and in production, we really wanted that first act, before we take the turn, to feel like those movies. We wanted it to feel as true to our ‘99 life as it could, because I don’t know that there’s a lot of representation of that era on screen. 

The film opens with a high schooler getting home and logging into AOL Instant Messenger, which is not a scene I think I’ve ever seen in another movie.

All of my relationships, between 17 and 22 years old, were short-lived and spawned because I was most confident flirting on Instant Messager.

So much is said about having a point of view in art and coming from a specific space. You lean into ‘90s nostalgia in a way that, if not handled correctly, could get too niche. For something like this or your Netflix series Saturday Morning All Star Hits, do you have guardrails for how you execute that while still appealing to a broad audience?  

I would argue that Saturday Morning All Star Hits actually was too niche. (Laughs.) It’s interesting because the subject matter of the show was Saturday morning cartoons and TV in the late eighties and early nineties. I felt like, “Oh, everybody experienced it.” I see listicles about “How nineties are you?” or whatever, so it thought it was something we all think and talk about. To a degree, it was hyper specific. You have to hope that the voice and the comedy carries it in such a way that, even if you aren’t clued into that universe, it’s intriguing fun to watch. But this one, I do feel like we’re dealing with a broader subject.

If you look at Rachel Zegler’s resume, this movie is right in between West Side Story, The Hunger Games spin-off and Disney’s live-action Snow White. All of those movies cost over $100 million, so Y2K is a real outlier. How’d you get her? 

Well, that’s fully accurate. We actually got her a few weeks before production started. She essentially saved the production. It was a miracle of sorts. And I don’t want to speak for her, but she’s a comedy fan and I think was excited to do something that was different from the bigger things she was doing.  I’ve never gotten to be a part of massive Disney movie or something like that, but it comes with its challenges. I think she was psyched to do something smaller and more run and gun. And she really shows her comedy chops. 

The tech here is such a huge part of the story. Were there any logos or brands you had a tough time getting on camera? 

Definitely. This isn’t really a spoiler, but Jaeden Martell’s character’s computer — the one that we open up with him logging into AOL — eventually turns into a robot. That was supposed to be an iMac. But I don’t think Apple wanted their machines strangling people or whatever the robot does — so we had to change the look of it by, like, 30 percent. There were a few instances like that, where we couldn’t get the exact thing, but we were allowed to get as close as possible. 

It’s very much out there that Fred Durst plays himself in this movie, and it’s actually a pretty big role. Did you have him in mind from the star? 

I texted Evan New Year’s Day 2019 with the seed of an idea of a movie about teenagers going to a high school party and Y2K actually happens. We were pitching it within a week, and in one them, we were like, “Maybe Fred Durst shows up.” From day one, he was considered a character. In every version of the script, he was there. 

So… what if he passed? 

There were moments throughout the process where we’d wonder, “If we can’t get Fred Durst, who would this be?” There was no one we could think of that occupied the distinct space that he does, and could also provide that calm. There was no one we knew that checked all those boxes. So, we were incredibly hopeful and that he would be a part of it. Once A24 got on board, Fred was the first person that we reached out to. It took a couple meetings to make sure that he was in — but, once he was in, he was in. I think his performance is really strong. 

This is your first big swing since you left Saturday Night Live. Did getting off of that train after nearly a decade come mean any career anxiety for you?

SNL is such a great gig in that it’s a regular job. I’ve yet to come close to anything like that. So I feel fortunate we got this movie greenlit in the second half of my final season. I knew I had at least something to work on and to think about. May last day was May 22, and then we were meeting people and finding department heads. It’s been a long process. I’m always going to be attracted to generating my own work. I feel like that’s what I think I’m good at. That being said, I would be fully happy to work on anything.