EDINBURGH 2023: Nick Pupo Q&A

BWW caught up with Nick Pupo to chat about bringing Addicted to the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Tell us a bit about Addicted.

Hello! I’ll give you the pitch:

“Addicted is a show about young friendship and a curious teenager’s conflicting impulses to either keep a promise with his best friend or try every drug he can get his hands on. 

Charlie was my first friend whom I met at 5 years-old during a burping contest. Charlie loved to make promises, and I’d give him my word whenever he asked. But keeping that word? That was a whole other matter. Some of the promises were small and insignificant, others would make or break our bond, but during this period of my life, I couldn’t tell the difference. 

I chronicle my life with tales of deceit, cowardice, shame, and, of course, heroin. I’ve woven in dozens of polished jokes and nuanced characters, as I try to reckon with my own addiction, the countless lies I’ve told to everyone I love, and the untimely death of a hamster named Jerry Maguire. You’ll love it, I promise.”

Why was this a story you wanted to tell?

There’s something I once heard a friend say, and I’m not gonna credit him because I’m gonna butcher this paraphrasing, but he said a thing like, “Sometimes you have a story in your brain that is burning to get out, and you feel like, if you don’t tell it, you’ll go crazy. That’s a story you gotta tell.” Sounds pretty self-important, and incredibly vague, but it makes perfect sense to me. I write a lot of jokes and stories that I enjoy, but occasionally I’ll have one that feels so important to me, or so funny, that it’s all I think about. I don’t know if there needs to be any other reason to tell a story than that. I hope this non-answer answers your question. 

Is it difficult when the material is so personal?

Oh, absolutely. The first draft of this show was written in a week and there were no jokes. It was just the raw, somewhat linear ramblings of a dude trying to make sense of his past. It brought up a lot of feelings about drug addiction and my history as an addict, a friend, brother, son. A lot of shame, and a lot of cravings for drugs that I hadn’t thought seriously about in over a decade. It eventually became easier to write and perform, in the way of not wanting to throw myself into a ravine. The more sense I make of this story that influenced my development as a human being, the easier it is to talk about. 

 

Where else might we know you from?

If you’re gonna know me from anything, it’s probably gonna be a TV show I guest starred in called Daisy Jones & The Six, in which I played a journalist for Rolling Stone magazine named Jonah Berg. I also played a recurring role on AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire as a computer coder named Carl for 17 episodes, I was John Cazale in The Offer on Paramount +, and that’s all I’m going to say because I just started feeling kinda gross about naming my credits. I’m not gonna delete them, though, cause they’re kinda cool.

 

What would you like audiences to take away from the show?

A thimble sized baggie of heroin that will be taped beneath their seats. Kidding! This question is tough for me, cause it’s hard not to sound incredibly full of myself. I’m just now learning what people are taking away from this show having performed it so many times. It’s always different from person to person. It would be insane if people walked away with the same thoughts. You might walk out and want to call your best friend, or a relative you haven’t spoken to in half a decade. You may walk away thinking I’m an asshole and addicts are selfish scumbags. My show is a lot about lying…I hope audiences walk away with a better understanding of liars. I hope they feel like they’re not bad people for lying, and I hope they feel more prone to forgiving people. I mostly want you to laugh. I don’t want you to cry, but if you have to, let me know, you can cry on me.

Nick Pupo’s debut stand up show ‘Addicted’ is at the Just the Tonic at the Bottle Room at 6.00pm from 3rd- 27th August (not 14th) for tickets go to www.edfringe.com

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