Comedian John Mulaney has checked into rehab for 60 days for alcohol and cocaine addiction.
A source exclusively confirmed to Page Six that the 38-year-old golden boy of comedy checked into a Pennsylvania rehab facility this past weekend.
Netflix stand-up star and “Saturday Night Live” alum Mulaney has been open about his past struggles with sobriety, telling stories of his partying and prescription and illegal drug abuse from a young age. He first became sober at age 23.
The source said, “John’s friends and family are happy that he’s finally getting some help and focusing on his health.
“His fans know he’s struggled in the past with sobriety, he has talked about it openly. Unfortunately he has struggled again during the pandemic.
“He’s on board with his recovery, he’s not fighting against rehab.”
In an interview last year, Mulaney revealed he began drinking at age 13. “I drank for attention,” he said. “I was really outgoing, and then at 12, I wasn’t. I didn’t know how to act. And then I was drinking, and I was hilarious again.”
He said in an Esquire cover story that his drinking also prompted him to start using drugs. He says that while he never liked smoking pot, he “loved” cocaine and dabbled with prescription drugs.
“I wasn’t a good athlete, so maybe it was some young male thing of ‘This is the physical feat I can do. Three Vicodin and a tequila and I’m still standing,'” he said. “Who’s the athlete now?”
When Mulaney was a teenager, his parents sent him to a psychiatrist, who told him that he was one part nice kid, one part “gorilla that wants to kill the other half.”
And in his 2012 special “New in Town,” he said, “I don’t drink. I used to drink, then I drank too much, and I had to stop. That surprises a lot of audiences, because I don’t look like someone who used to do anything.”
After years of blacking out and even drinking perfume, the tipping point was a 2005 bender when he was 23 years old.
He told Esquire, “I went on a bender that weekend that was just, like, fading in and out of a movie … It was just crazy … I was like, ‘You’re f–king out of control,'” he said. “And I thought to myself, ‘I don’t like this guy anymore. I’m not rooting for him.'”
Mulaney said he stopped doing cocaine and drinking alcohol within a month of one another. He claimed he didn’t go to rehab, he just went cold turkey, and was sober for many years after that.
Mulaney, who was a staff writer at “SNL,” has been seen hanging out with fellow comedian Pete Davidson, saying that one of his goals has been to show Davidson that “you can have a life in comedy that is not insane — a sober, domestic life.”
But earlier this month, Mulaney — who hosted “SNL” for the fourth time in October and later revealed he had been investigated by the Secret Service over one joke — revealed he had taken a role as a staff writer on Seth Meyers’ show for the sake of his own mental health.
“During quarantine, I was like, ‘Why am I going totally crazy and why am I suddenly telling my own wife my accomplishments?’” Mulaney said on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” while describing how a lack of routine can negatively affect a person’s well-being. “I really needed a job.”
“One, I like having a boss and having assignments to do,” he added to Kimmel. “When I’m in charge of something, not so much the best thing.”
He added that his psychiatrist agreed with the move.
“She said to me, ‘Without external structure, I don’t have any confidence in you thriving’ … and she would know, because I told her everything in my brain,” he said.
A rep for Mulaney declined to comment.