Big Nate focuses on the life of Nate Wright, a goofy and creative sixth-grader who finds himself juggling his creative confidence and his frequent attempts to stay ahead of his school's antics. Created by Lincoln Pierce in 1991, Big Nate had its start as a comic strip and book series. Now, after multiple attempts to bring the character to either film or television, Nickelodeon Animation and Paramount+ are adapting Nate and his world in a new animated series. Played by Ben Giroux, Nate is a sweet-natured, occasionally over-confident and frequently panicked character. The brightly animated adaptation, which translates the spirit of the original comics and novels, is a fun new addition to the streaming service's library.
During an exclusive interview with CBR ahead of Big Nate's Feb. 17 premiere on Paramount+, Lincoln Pierce reflected on what has surprised him the most about the series after 30 years, why now is the perfect time to bring Nate Wright to screens and what it means to him to see the animated character finally come to life.
CBR: You've been with this character for so long -- writing Nate, working on his friends and family, crafting so much about Nate Wright's world for over 30 years at this point. What is it like to see him finally make the leap to animation?
Lincoln Peirce: It's amazing. I have to say that over the years, we had a few offers to turn Nate into a movie or a show. Most of those offers were for live-action projects and I always said, "Nate's a cartoon character." Whatever Big Nate show or movie there is, it's going to be a cartoon. In my mind, I was thinking it would be a 2D cartoon because I work in two dimensions and I've always drawn Nate that way. Although I loved the look of 3D animation, I was never quite sure how that would translate. Then when I started seeing the character designs that Nickelodeon was coming up with, I was blown away.
One of the most exciting moments of my professional life was when they sent me some little test animation and I saw Nate. They sent me this little thing where Nate sort of got pushed back onto a desk and then sort of teetered on the edge of the desk and fell off. I thought, "That looks incredible." I was delighted. So to see Nate and all the characters come to life and then to hear the voices too --the phenomenal acting talent that these performers just imbue the characters with is just phenomenal. It's been great.
Nate is a unique version of that classic "troublemaker" archetype. You look at somebody like Charlie Brown from Peanuts or Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes -- this is a character type, an American cartooning tradition with this kind of character. But Nate has a really fun vulnerability. He's confident but quick to almost panic. What is the thing that you would say makes Nate really stand out?
I think you sort of hit on it. He walks this super-thin line between this unshakable self-confidence, which I think a lot of people have at certain points in their lives, and then it kind of disappears when you get into a new situation. I think his age and his time in life, which is sixth grade, is really central to who he is. I see sixth grade... I don't know how it was where you went to school, but where I went to school fifth grade was the final year of elementary school and then the sixth grade is the first year of middle school -- and they are like night and day. I think of Nate as being this kid who is in this transition, where you can just picture that a year ago, as a fifth-grader, he was the king of the world. He was one of the big kids in school.
Now he's in sixth grade. All of a sudden, you still have this confidence. You still sort of think of yourself in this way and yet no, because you're in the school with seventh and eighth-graders. You're 11 years old and some of these 13-year-olds look like they're in high school. You're playing that self-confidence on one side with the doubt that you have at that stage of life. Who am I? How do other people see me? He's kind of neurotic and insanely self-confident at the same time. I think [Ben Giroux] really... He gets it. He can embody just the sort of over-the-top self-confidence and then he can embody the really sort of deep misgivings and doubts that you have as a sixth-grader.
Nickelodeon and Paramount+ seem like a perfect fit for this show, considering Nate as a character. There have been other attempts to bring Big Nate to screens -- what convinced you that Nickelodeon Animation and Paramount+ were the right people?
I think it was a combination that started actually with John Cohen, who is our producer and is a guy that I made a handshake deal with a number of years ago. He wrote me a letter about Big Nate. I don't know quite how Big Nate got on his radar, but he wrote me a letter and said, "Here's why I love Big Nate and here's why I think it would make a tremendous project, whether it's a movie or a TV show." He checked all my boxes and that really showed me that he understood the character. So I already knew that the character was sort of being pitched, it was being shepherded by someone who I felt 100% comfortable with and confident in.
Then at Nickelodeon, he talked to Ramsey Naito, who knew the character. I think her kids were into the character. They had a meeting of the minds and then Ramsey had Mitch Watson in mind as Head Writer, Showrunner, Executive Producer. He's someone who... Even though I had not yet seen any treatments, I hadn't seen any animation, but the way everyone was talking about what they liked about Big Nate, my comfort level was really, really high. I remember, we had a Zoom meeting and I just wanted to make sure. I asked in the Zoom meeting where Mitch was there, Ramsey was there, John was there, and I said, "I just want to make sure that we all are on the same page."
Big Nate, it doesn't have necessarily the sexiest name. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, that spells it right out. It's very descriptive. It's very evocative. Big Nate is sort of maybe not so many bells and whistles. Nate's world, it's really sort of contained within this small town, in this sort of crumbling underfunded school. I said, "There maybe aren't quite so many bells and whistles in terms of where we can go story-wise. Are we all okay with that?" They were like, "That's what we love. These are the things that we like. These are the things we think kids will respond to, in terms of Nate's relationship with his classmates, his relationship with the teachers." I'm so glad that this is the deal that's being made with Nickelodeon and then eventually with Paramount+ and not some other deal that I might have had the chance at a few years back, because this is in a spot with people who really respond to the same things that I respond to when I'm writing the strip or writing the novels.
Did anybody go to a good middle school? I remember my friends and I found in the gym one day in maybe eighth grade, we spotted a lot of bats in our gym. P.S. 38 really ended up striking a chord with me.
That's funny, because that's a good example of something that the show is really amplifying, where that's not... The fact that P.S. 38 is literally falling apart and is underfunded, it really isn't a part of the original comic strip. It's a storyline that became part of one of the novels that I wrote, one of the Big Nate novels. Then part of the development process and the world-building process for the show is, let's really play this up. Part of Nate's identity is tied up in the school that he goes to and the school is sort of unacceptable in a lot of ways. By the way, it's right across the street from this amazing charter school, so there are going to be so many possibilities for really funny stories around this kind of rivalry, this dynamic between P.S. 38 and then Jefferson Middle School and the kind of different states they're in.
After spending so much time with Nate Wright and his world, is there anything that's really caught you by surprise about the character?
Well, I can think of two things. One dates from years ago, before TV was even a glimmer in my eye, and the other is about TV. So the first one was that when I started the strip, I thought the strip was going to be about Nate's family. I thought it was going to be sort of a domestic humor strip. There were a lot of strips around back then that sort of trafficked in that: Calvin and Hobbes, of course, and For Better Or For Worse, this sort of traditional family dynamic. I found after working on the strip for a year, what I realized is that what I really like are all the school gags. School is where it's at. I'm a former school teacher myself. Schools are hilarious places. I realized the jokes I really like and the stories I really like telling are all about Nate's school and his classmate and teachers, so that caught me by a surprise. I was happy to sort of adjust my thinking around that.
Then as far as TV goes, it's just been a surprise to me to see how much you can create, how creative you can be in this animated world in ways that you can't necessarily be in four little panels in a comic strip. I knew that we were going to be able to tell bigger stories than I can tell in the comic strip, but in terms of the style, that's really been a really happy surprise. The way that the animators sort of play with different styles --there's Nate's notebook world, which is a part of the animation, and they're creating this almost sort of Monty Python-esque sort of little bits of animation, too, that correspond and correlate with the way characters are thinking or imagining things. So that was great because I didn't expect any of that. That was a huge, huge surprise and a really, really good creative surprise.
Catch Big Nate's animated debut on Paramount+ on Feb. 17.