Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Tori Preston | Celebrity | February 10, 2026
My common complaint with the Good Hang podcast is that it’s almost too cozy. Amy Poehler brings an easy curiosity to her interviews, but that ease is challenged when she’s interviewing someone she’s friends with, as she often does, because she already knows them. She knows how to lead them into particular corners of their careers or lives, but she also knows what they’ll say, and that shared history tends to tip into inside jokes of varying mileage for the audience.
Turns out, there’s an easy solution for that: Jonathan Groff. Amy didn’t know Jonathan before he appeared on Good Hang this week. They met for the first time when he arrived at her studio, and as they quickly explained on mic, he picked her up in a bear hug when they greeted each other. This leads them to ponder whether picking up petite women is a faux pas, though Amy assures him that in his case, she enjoyed it. That’s the first of many casual flirtations the pair exchange, in what proves to be an unexpectedly electric interview. Groff and Poehler have killer theater-kid energy together, but they also have no shared history to speak of. There are no inside jokes other than the ones that spring up between them organically (including callbacks to their school performances as Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz”), and Amy doesn’t already know the answers to her own questions.
It’s also, perhaps, the first episode that managed to come full circle on itself narratively, though that’s probably a happy accident. Per her schtick, Amy rings up Gracie Lawrence, Groff’s former costar in the Broadway musical Just In Time, for a question to pose to Groff. After dispensing with an unexpected cameo from Jon Stewart and Abbi Jacobson, who were lurking in Gracie’s dressing room when she hopped on the Zoom, Gracie offers a pretty great question. She was always struck by how calm and poised Groff is, no matter how hectic his life is, so like, what gives? Has he always been that way, or what?
Though Amy doesn’t pose the question until later in the episode, she unintentionally leads Groff through a lot of moments in his life when he wasn’t calm - and almost all of them have to do with his sexuality. When he talks about coming out to his family, and later embracing it as part of his public persona or by playing gay characters (like in Looking), he explains beautifully how he found the strength to be himself by playing characters who were themselves, as if it were a muscle he trained in his performances. The fact that his actual answer to the question, when Amy finally delivers it, is about how he just naturally flips a calm switch when he panics, is almost beside the point. It’s not that he’s unflappable at all, it’s just that he’s already faced his fears - and they aren’t the ones you might have expected.
Now that Good Hang has been around for a while, I expect Amy will sit down with many more people she doesn’t already know (she’s gotta be running out of friends, right?). Even if she doesn’t click with her guests the way she did with Groff, this week was a great showcase of her abilities as an interviewer in uncharted waters. But mostly, it was just a really good hang.
