asshole

Howard Schultz: “I Firmly Believe” Americans Want a President Just Like Me

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Three weeks ago, former Starbucks C.E.O. Howard Schultz announced he was seriously considering running for president on an independent ticket. Since then, virtually everyone who’s been asked about the matter (and some who haven’t!) has insisted it’s a horrible idea, from fellow billionaire Mike Bloomberg to political pundits to New York Times columnists to a heckler in a Manhattan Barnes & Noble who yelled, “You’ll help elect Trump, you billionaire, egotistical asshole.” The response has been so overwhelmingly negative primarily because, to the heckler’s point, a survey determined that an independent run would take enough votes from a Democratic candidate to re-elect Donald Trump, a prospect no sane person wants to even contemplate. Yet, for some reason, Schultz is unbowed!

In a letter e-mailed to supporters and published on Medium Monday, the man who unleashed Unicorn Frappuccinos on the masses insisted that the haters telling him not to run simply don’t get it, writing:

I . . . believe critics are ignoring, or failing to acknowledge, the degree to which our two-party system is failing the American people. Polling consistently shows that more than 60 percent of respondents believe our two-party system is broken and that it’s time for a centrist candidate who is unaffiliated with either party to be president. To be very clear, I firmly believe there is an unprecedented appetite for a centrist independent presidential candidate, and that there is a credible path for an independent to win more than the necessary 270 electoral votes — a key criteria in my consideration of whether to run.

In fact, according to Schultz, he’s trying to save the Democratic Party from itself. If left unchecked, he wrote, radical-lefty Dems would be just as—if not more!—likely to hand Trump the presidency on their own:

The stakes are too high to cross our fingers and hope the Democratic Party nominates a moderate who can win over enough independents and disaffected Republicans, and even fellow Democrats, to defeat Trump next year. That any opponent can oust Trump, no matter how far to the radical left they are, is a fallacy. Those so concerned about a centrist independent being a spoiler should perhaps ask another question: Will the eventual Democratic nominee be the party’s own version of a spoiler? Of course, it’s too early to know who the nominee will be. We must let the process play out. And that same standard should apply to a discussion of a possible independent candidacy.

Of course, Schultz double-pinky-swears he won’t be a spoiler, and is “committed to ensuring that I will do nothing to re-elect Donald Trump. I mean it”—a promise that might be a bit more convincing if he weren’t seriously contemplating a run that would almost certainly . . . re-elect Trump. In related news, during a CBS This Morning interview Tuesday to discuss his 2020 bid, Bernie Sanders said Schultz represents everything that’s wrong with our political system, and should stop “blackmailing” the Democratic Party.

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The Long Adolescence of Lucas Hedges

The only thing more “New York” than knowing that the Guggenheim was closed on Thursdays was not knowing that the Guggenheim was closed on Thursdays. Museums are for tourists, not for people who have lived their whole lives here and thus have better things to do with their time, such as watch TV and order crappy Chinese takeout and buy their coffee from authentic, Giuliani-era establishments like Starbucks.

That's what we told ourselves, at least, Lucas Hedges and I, after realizing the doors were locked. The discovery elicited a desperate moment of panic on my part and an Edvard Munch–like fake scream on his. Hedges, who studied acting at an art school in North Carolina for a year but has otherwise spent his entire 22 years in New York, grabbed the straps of his backpack like an earnest alpiner and stared out across Fifth Avenue. Wondering what we would do with the afternoon if not wander around a Frank Lloyd Wright–designed concrete spiral, I asked him, blank-mindedly, the world's worst question: “So how are you?”

We had only met once before, the week prior, for less than two hours, but Hedges seemed to have amplified the initial encounter into something like a deep past, answering with the easy, assumptive intimacy of an old friend.

“I'm gooooood,” he replied. He cocked his head, parrot-style. “I'ma gooooooooooooooooooood.”

We both laughed. It was just the sort of time-embroidering, untranscribable non-joke that Hedges performs constantly, demonstrating, unconsciously, a talent for spotting comic potential in tiny moments that to other people feel like the unremarkable material of mere existence. Like most everything else Hedges would do while we were together, it was very lovable.

Culturally ambitious plans foiled, we headed to Central Park for a walk. It was December but unseasonably warm—“creepy out,” as he put it—and in lieu of a jacket, Hedges wore a crewneck sweatshirt onto which his girlfriend had stitched a bunch of inside jokes in rainbow thread. “I'm so scared of ruining it,” he said. “People keep coming up to me asking, ‘What's your drip?’ ” Showing both common courtesy and admirable theory of mind, Hedges turned to me and said, “Do you know what that means?” I told him I did not. “Your drip is your swag,” he explained. “Are you supposed to provide the brand name of the item?” I asked. “Honestly I don't really know,” he answered. “People have just said it to me. And I know enough to know that it means, basically, ‘What's this thing you're wearing that I think is cool?’ ”

Some of you may not even remember the last movie you saw that didn't have Lucas Hedges in it. He was in Manchester by the Sea, playing a seething, r-dropping, ice-hockey-playing teen, and in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, as a son mourning his murdered sister. He played a gay high school student in Lady Bird and a gay college student in Boy Erased. A drug addict in Ben Is Back. A thuggish, self-loathing burnout in Mid90s. If you happen to live in or frequently visit New York City, you maybe also saw him on Broadway this winter in The Waverly Gallery, Kenneth Lonergan's very funny but also extremely brutal play about a Greenwich Village–dwelling grandmother with Alzheimer's. Hedges, for now at least, is always playing somebody's son—not a kid anymore but still not quite an adult, stronger and taller than whoever is cast as his mom but still inclined to cry on her shoulder.

To many, Hedges is already a celebrity. Soon enough, he'll be one in the cultural imagination of everyone else, too. For the past few years, he's been the secret, under-age heart of everything he's appeared in, but in a year or so, maybe two or three, he'll be everywhere, and seen as an adult. It's fun to watch someone grow up and become famous, simultaneously, in front of the world. It's fun in the way watching a ski jumper take off is fun. The inevitability is thrilling. You know something spectacular is about to happen, no matter how they land it. But you kind of need to hold your breath.

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Being a movie star is a totally bizarre job when you think about it, one that fame itself would seem to undermine. Tricking strangers into thinking you're someone else? But then also…doing a bunch of stuff—going on talk shows, appearing on magazine covers—that makes you, the real you, recognizable to the world? It's like the job's chief occupational hazard is also its premise. Hedges likes to mess with this. When people come up to him on the street, which they do more and more these days, it's often with an air of reluctance. “I actually get a lot of ‘You look like this guy, I forget his name. Lucas something?’ ” he told me. “Then I say, ‘Oh, cool.’ And I sort of just…wait. Sometimes they're like, ‘Is it you?’ And, depending on how I feel, I often say no.”

For what it's worth, that's not what I witnessed. Over a few hours I spent with Hedges in downtown Manhattan, about a dozen people recognized him. Roughly half of them gave a quick nod and complimented, in passing, a particular performance. Once, a guy about Hedges's own age stopped dead in his tracks as his friends continued walking.

“Oh my gosh, we were just talking about Lady Bird because there's that scene filmed right there. And I was like, ‘Oh shit, is that Lucas Hedges?’ ”

Hedges grinned. “Cool!” he said.

“What's good, man? Nice to meet you.”

Hedges smiled again. “Yeah, nice to meet you, too.”

“Right on.”

“Well, have a good one.”

“Yeah, you too.”

Hedges turned to me and laughed. “So weird. People just talk to you like they know you,” he said. A few minutes later, a middle-aged woman passed us. She didn't say anything but was walking unnaturally slowly. “God, that woman looked at me like I wasn't even a human being,” Hedges said. “I don't mean like she was in awe of me, more like I was something to be stared at. And I'm not saying this to suggest it's what my life is. I'm not like, ‘Like, see?! People don't even see me as real!’ That's not what I'm trying to say, I swear.”

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Hedges, who has titian-blond hair and attenuated limbs, retains that perverse charm of adolescent boys—that heartrending quality that makes you want to kiss them and take care of them at the same time. Hedges is conversationally reactive. He listens attentively. He apologizes when he has to be on his phone for more than five seconds. He's what people mean when they call someone a “good egg.” When we met for the first time, a few hours before he would have to go onstage, he told me he didn't mind that I had a cold. “My mom has one, too,” he offered. He then proceeded to ask me more questions about myself than any employer ever has, than any date ever has, than my parents do after too much time away.

What was my high school like? Do I want kids? Do I consider myself to be maternal? Do I like the experience of being mentored? Is the joy I take in New York City mostly one of nostalgia for a past I never experienced? What does language mean to me? Do I ever read my articles aloud to my mom and dad? How did I meet my husband? What's his name? Would I ever want to write fiction? If we went to a basketball game together, would it actually be useful or would it be too hard for me to hear anything he said? Am I good at giving presents? I wasn't paying for lunch, right? It was on the magazine?

“There’s actually just no way I can be truly great at this until I’ve put in 20 more years.”—Lucas Hedges

Hedges speaks in ideas-dense sentences built around well-chosen verbs. He worries that his general aversion to texting is “a reflection of some naturally selfish tendencies” and that his affection for movies he knows are dull and not actually any good might indicate “a lack of trust in, or maybe even disdain for, other people.” Hedges thinks film sets are difficult environments in which to experience the pleasures of tutelage because they're so “product-oriented” and that there's something “very dreamlike, almost eerie about being on a theater stage, because even the audience's laughter becomes this alien, dehumanized sound.” He speaks French and Spanish, each pretty well; references, non-annoyingly, both Terrence Malick and the fact that he prefers the company of much older people to that of his peers. Once, while we were eating lunch in SoHo, he got distracted mid-conversation by a man walking by in pajama-like outerwear and fashionable eyeglasses. “Sorry, I was just checking to see if that was Julian Schnabel,” Hedges said, referring to the eccentrically dressed American painter. He looked closer, and it became clearer that the man was possibly homeless. “It's not. It's a poor man's Julian Schnabel. A, er, very poor man's Julian Schnabel.” Hedges would be impressive—curious, canny, cosmopolitan—for a second-semester Ivy League senior with a New Yorker internship secured for the summer. That he's a movie star is insane.

Watch:

Lucas Hedges Tells GQ About His Iconic RolesSee the video.

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To spend any time at all around Hedges is to be convinced that acting is an intellectual pursuit, and that good acting is a cerebral skill. “Most writing is so bad that when something feels real it's actually shocking,” he said. “It's the same with acting—you can tell when an actor is speaking but not also looking at themselves, you know what I mean? Some of the best acting isn't even being witnessed. I've seen friends from college do scenes, and it's honestly better than any acting I've ever seen, and I've worked with the ‘best’ actors in the world.”

Hedges didn't enact the air quotes around “best” until he was halfway through the word, realizing a split micro-second too late that without them he might seem like a dick. But then a split micro-second after that, he recalculated, allowing the air quotes to wilt a bit as he realized having them up there wasn't quite right either. Hedges didn't verbally articulate any of this, but it was obvious that's what was going on inside his head.

“After every movie I do, the only scenes that people compliment me on are the ones where I cry,” Hedges said, laughing. This makes sense. He's a good crier, and crying on command seems really hard. But the thing he's maybe best at—and it's sort of a weird thing to compliment—is portraying barely contained male rage. In Manchester by the Sea, Hedges plays Patrick, a 16-year-old kid outside Boston whose father has just died of heart failure and who is suddenly put in the care of his grieving uncle. The performance got him nominated for an Oscar. Everyone talks about the part where he breaks down, sobbing, after a bunch of frozen meat falls out of the freezer. But that scene is only one minute long; the movie itself is over two hours, and throughout it, in dozens of moments, we see Patrick helplessly enter and then fail to exit concentrated moments of adolescent indignation at a register just barely higher than what would be typical were everything going his way.

“It's not a bleeding heart he's showing you, it's a broken one,” Ashley Gates Jansen, an ordained minister and acting teacher and the person Hedges most credits with “changing his life,” told me. She cited his characters' lack of eye contact and his monosyllabic answers as “the kind of armor that young men put up, that armor of bitterness and cynicism and agitation.” Jansen, who has an 18-year-old son, told me, “I really do see my own kid up there whenever Lucas is on-screen.”

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“Any conversation you begin with Lucas, you’re immediately in it. You talk with him and you get the impression that you have the full benefit of his soul turned on you.”—Kenneth Lonergan

Most of the characters that Hedges has played are, like him, sensitive, thoughtful, smart. Ian, Hedges's character in Mid90s, Jonah Hill's directorial debut about a gaggle of Clinton-era skaters, is, at first glance, an exception. He's self-hating and violent; he steals, beats up his little brother, scowls all the time. Hill wrote the part specifically for Hedges after Hill's sister, Beanie Feldstein, called him from the set of Lady Bird and said, “There's this actor. You're going to freak out.”

To prepare for the role, Hedges spent a few weeks walking around Venice Beach in his costume: head shaved, Eminem-style; diamond studs in his ears; baggy jeans. “It was really shocking how differently people treated me,” he recalled. “People would ask, ‘Did you see the game last night?’ And nobody has ever in my life, not once, asked me if I've ‘seen the game.’ ” Having a shaved head, he said, seemed to inspire fear in people. “If I looked at a girl, she would look away immediately,” he said. “And it was honestly the same with guys.… I've never been a person anyone was scared of, so I think I was a little excited about the prospect of people being frightened by me.”

Hill, who thinks of Hedges “like a little brother,” said that “nobody else could have played that role,” one for which he didn't want to cast someone “who would present as stock asshole.” Hedges, he said, “is a heart with arms and legs” who knows, intuitively, that it's when a person feels most sensitive that they “overcompensate by being harsh and violent.” The very best actors, Hill continued, could also be the very best psychiatrists. “It's the same thing,” he said. “They're interested in human behavior; they're curious about why people do the things they do.” Like Shia LaBeouf, who called Hedges a “truth-seeking missile,” Hill praised Hedges's inquisitiveness, his “billions” of good questions. “When you mix curiosity and sensitivity, you have a great artist,” he said. “When you add incredibly good looks to that, you have a movie star. A movie star who is also a great artist. That's Lucas.” Hill went on to talk about how the roles that Hedges has chosen have allowed him to be seen—by audiences and film critics and all-purpose fans—for who he is. “It took me years and years to figure out a way for my work to align with who I am,” Hill said. “And Lucas is just, well, he's already there.”

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After lunch one afternoon in December, we settled into a bench in Washington Square Park, a Manhattan locale best known for the fashionably dressed N.Y.U. students who ramble through it and the murmuring pot pushers who service them. A man with a bongo drum scored our conversation; teenage skateboarders provided the figurative B-roll. “I always wanted to skate, but I could never figure it out,” Hedges said. “They're the coolest people in the world…like how they seem effortless and lazy while also just being really good at something. That's so appealing—doing the most but looking like you're doing the least.” He was speaking in a meandering, only half-conscious way, not realizing that he was, in effect, describing acting and arguably also the reason for his own success. “Were you into skaters?” Hedges asked. But as I was midway through admitting that yes, of course, who wasn't, he interrupted to apologize for the question, which presupposed (correctly) that I didn't skate myself.

In only a few hours, Hedges would be due at the theater where, for four consecutive months this winter, he did eight performances per week of Kenneth Lonergan's The Waverly Gallery. “It's hard to do a long run of a play without having your performance calcify,” Lonergan, who directed Hedges in Manchester by the Sea as well, told me. “It's the same story, the same marks, but the characters have to develop, the relationships have to get deeper and not just fall into a routine.” Hedges, Lonergan continued, “has only ever done one other Broadway play, but there he is, every night, up there with Elaine May and Joan Allen.” The character he plays is supposed to be a few years older than Hedges is in real life. When they began rehearsals, Lonergan explained, that was evident to a degree, but in the few months since, “he seems like he's matured three to four years.”

“Listen, Lucas is not going to have three movies and a Broadway play every year—it’s just not going to happen. But he can wake up every day and try to do meaningful work.”—Peter Hedges

“I think a lot of people mistake naturalism for relaxation,” Lonergan went on. “But being comfortable is not the same thing as being alive and real and truthful. Any conversation you begin with Lucas, you're immediately in it. He can be a little self-conscious, but he's also very much an open book, and that combination is great in anyone, but it's particularly great in an actor. You talk with him and you get the impression that you have the full benefit of his soul turned on you.”

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Hedges's nights usually went something like this: Arrive, eat dinner, stretch, do a bunch of breathing exercises, curtain. But some nights it was more like: Arrive, “fuck around,” curtain. By “fuck around” he mostly meant run absurdist baby names by Elaine May, the play's 86-year-old star. “The one she likes a lot right now that I also love is Oates,” Hedges said. “But I like to mess with her, too. I'm like, ‘What do you think about the name Rope?’ And she goes, ‘Eh, too literal.…’ She likes consonants, and a lot of the names I come up with are more about the vowels. Like Ingemar. I ran that one by her the other night.”

Just then, a man in a black suit and payot approached our bench. “Are you Jewish?” he asked Hedges, pointedly ignoring me. Hedges shook his head. “No, man, I'm not.” The man scurried away. “That was the most suspicious ‘Are you Jewish?’ I've ever gotten in my entire life,” Hedges said, laughing. “Like, was that dude actually just a drug dealer maybe?” We watched him approach a pair of skateboarders who, upon spotting him, immediately rode off. “I can't say those are the two coolest skaters I've ever seen,” Hedges said. “Or…the most Jewish skaters.”

A brief mention of his girlfriend segued into a moment of spontaneous gratitude. “I really can't tell you how amazing life is right now,” Hedges said. “I feel like every interview I do, it's like, ‘I'm so anxious, I'm so scared,’ but I'm just fed up with saying that. I mean, it's true to some extent, but I'm so just so happy right now. Everything's going really well.” He wondered aloud if loving and grieving weren't actually symbiotic emotional states and whether an effective method for keeping a long-term relationship vividly alive might be to try to remember, always, that one's partner would, like everyone else, die eventually. “I know how weird that sounds,” he said, laughing again. It didn't sound weird at all. The only thing weird about it was the uncanny experience of receiving poignant, precocious, and ultimately correct relationship advice, unbidden, from a 22-year-old.

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When Hedges is preparing for a role, which, these days, he seems usually to be, he writes himself a letter before going to bed. “Dear Inner Self,” he begins. “If it is your will, please reveal to me in a dream tonight, what it is you'd like me to learn about this character.” Then he dreams whatever he dreams, wakes up, transcribes the images and sensations, and e-mails his dream coach, who responds, therapist-like, with a bunch of questions that in aggregate are meant to produce, for Hedges, what he calls “a blueprint of what all the moments in the movie remind me of in my own life.”

Hedges, who describes his job as the work of “turning the character into me,” knows exactly what he sounds like when he talks about his process. “You know, that's where it sort of becomes very esoteric. To some extent, it's just like, uh, ‘Just act, just fucking act. Act with the other person in your scene.…’ But I don't really know how to suddenly have, like, a whole family history with someone I've known for a week or less.”

Hedges's own family history has been one of privilege: Brooklyn Heights brownstone, private school, intact family, celebrated father (the writer and director Peter Hedges). But it's a nexus of luck that seems to have furnished him with everything the most optimistic and least cynical economists model for: gratitude, generosity, social grace, cultural savvy, intergenerational friendships, confidence. Hedges thinks that if he weren't an actor, he might have liked to be a teacher. It's easy to imagine him leaving a modest, tastefully decorated outer-borough apartment, NPR mug in hand, and taking the subway to some high school in the Bronx.

Growing up under the roof of a director meant early exposure to moviemaking and its adjacent thrills. Hedges appeared as an extra, at the age of 10, in Dan in Real Life, which his father wrote and directed. His first proper role was in Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, for which he was cast on the spot in the audition, which itself was an indirect result of a seventh-grade production of Nicholas Nickleby. Peter Hedges, recalling the performance, said that “everyone else was in a school play, and Lucas was in a Bergman film.” During intermission, Peter remembers, he asked a group of high school students loitering in the doorway why they were there. “It was an assignment,” they answered ensemble. “Why,” Peter asked, “were high school students assigned to see a middle-school play?” They laughed. “We weren't assigned to see the play—we were assigned to see Lucas.”

A decade later, at the “imploring” of Julia Roberts, Peter Hedges was able to persuade his reluctant son to star in Ben Is Back. Over tea at a Brooklyn coffee shop around the corner from where Lucas grew up, Peter told me, with a bit of remorse, how much he overshot many of the scenes in the film. “It wasn't until we got into dailies and could project it big and I wasn't in a parka, freezing and worried for time, that I was often able to really see his performance. I was repeatedly, I wouldn't say stunned, but in awe at how much was there, how much more there was.”

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Peter spoke of his son both as a father and as a professional peer, and by the end of our conversation there were tears in his eyes. “Listen,” he said, “Lucas is not going to have three movies and a Broadway play every year—it's just not going to happen. But what can happen is that you can wake up every day and try to do meaningful work and to also engage meaningfully with family and friends and even the people you meet on the street.” He sighed and knocked three times on the table.

About a month after our first, thwarted attempt, we returned to the Guggenheim, or as Lucas began referring to it in text messages, between pictures of his family dog in a hat, “The Goog.” The current show, a retrospective of the Swedish painter and mystic Hilma af Klint, had, over the few months since it opened, gone from critically acclaimed curiosity to go-to Instagram backdrop. For every two or three severe-looking Appreciators of Fine Art milling around, there was at least one teenage girl done up in a Kylie Jenner Lip Kit.

“Right now I’m not looking to do a project that carries the weight of life itself on its shoulders.… I want to do something that feels very personally significant.”—Lucas Hedges

Hedges arrived in sweatpants, sleepy-eyed, wearing white Air Force 1s and a Brave New World T-shirt, both well-worn. As usual, he had been onstage the night before and not returned to the SoHo apartment that he shares with his elder brother, who works in finance, until after midnight. “I read about sports at night,” he admitted. “For hours and hours. Like, last night I came home, and I was exhausted, but I couldn't not read about sports. I was on NBA.com, on NFL.com, reading about the Jets, reading about the new head coach, checking the players' Instagrams.” He shook his head and rubbed his eyes.

Before he wanted to be an actor, Hedges wanted to be a basketball player. As a kid, he made everyone call him Sprewell, as in Latrell Sprewell, the small forward who played for the Knicks from 1998 to 2003—i.e., from when Hedges was 2 until he was 7. His bedroom was plastered with posters of basketball players and coaches, to whom he'd pray every night before games. “I was just like, ‘This is what a basketball player should have!’ ” he recalled. “So fucking ridiculous.” Hedges has come to a more realistic assessment of his own talents over the years, though he's still a fan. He sat courtside at Madison Square Garden for the first time a few weeks before we met, but he admitted that he spent most of the game thinking about that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David accidentally trips Shaquille O'Neal.

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We made our way up The Goog's iconic spiral ramps, Hedges stopping often to close-read the wall text. His reactions to the paintings were immediate and playful and appreciative and mostly muttered under his breath rather than to me: “Whoa,” “Wow,” “Holy shit,” “This is insane,” “Wait, this is her work, too? Oh, no, ha, that's a Seurat.”

I mentioned to him that I had talked, the day before, with Ashley Gates Jansen, his former acting teacher, and that she had praised the social responsibility with which he seemed to have chosen all his roles to date. He knew what she was referring to. She was referring to him playing characters who are grieving and questioning their sexuality and struggling with drug addictions, but that isn't necessarily what he's most interested in doing going forward, at least not immediately, he said. “I want to do something where you couldn't watch it and say that's wrong or that's bad. I mean, I suppose anything could be bad, but more like something in which it's like, ‘Oh, there are infinite possibilities here instead of aiming for one thing,’ if that makes sense.” He mentioned Wild at Heart, David Lynch's 1990 crime comedy, as an example.

“All I know right now is that I'm really loving getting to do these jobs and that I'm getting a better and better sense of what it is I want to do, and right now I'm not looking to do a project that carries the weight of life itself on its shoulders or even anything super socially relevant,” he said. “I want to do something that feels very personally significant, which might mean something that's actually really insignificant.… I mean, I love dancing, and I was thinking about this on my way over here, how I'd love to just make a music video. Go off somewhere and make one with some friends—or not, maybe just me.”

It's unclear whether other people, having gotten used to the ethical approach he's so far given to his career, will want something as “insignificant” as what Hedges is fantasizing about. Casey Affleck, who co-starred with Hedges in Manchester by the Sea and whom Lonergan witnessed being a mentor to Hedges on set, said, “He's kind of a shining example of the best of his generation. He's socially conscious, he's informed, he's confident but humble and kind, too. He's really expressive and supportive and earnest and won't be deterred despite his humility. He makes me think of those kids in Parkland, you know? I mean, they're all just so amazing, and it makes you think, Jesus, everyone over 25 should just get out of the way for all the Lucases of the world.”

Hedges resisted talking about his career as anything methodical or planned, as a possible plot that he himself had intentions about or even the ability to control. “Anything that exists in a collective consciousness, it probably doesn't actually exist,” he said. By collective consciousness, Hedges means consensus, a sometimes tacit, sometimes blurted-from-the-headlines agreement among moviegoers and critics and fans about who he is and what he's up to: “Like, if it goes down in the historical narrative, it's somehow less trustworthy to me, because it's like once something gets believed by a mass number of people, you have to wonder if it's actually true. The people whose opinions I care about most exist outside of this collective consciousness, so there's a part of me that really doesn't trust this big old narrative about whatever is happening with me, because it's like, well, if I asked the people I respect most, they might be like, ‘Eh, I didn't really like that movie, to be honest.’ ”

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I asked for an example of someone whose opinion he trusts.

“My friend Fred,” he answered.

“Careers don't exist,” he continued. “Does a father or a mother exist in any way other than how they are with their children? A parent who would think in terms of a bigger picture is to some extent completely absent to their children.… A father who is making decisions to be This Kind of Father? To me that doesn't even seem like a father.”

Hedges paused, suddenly aware that whatever he just said could possibly sound, to my ears, pretentious or abstract or maybe even stoned. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” And then he laughed.

Tourists with Nikons yoked around their necks passed us by; so did art students, children, and pearly-haired women in interesting eyewear. By the time we reached the second floor, Hedges had begun to modulate his speech in a way I hadn't heard before. Sometimes, midsentence, he would lower his voice to a near whisper. There was never a pause, never an interruption in what was an otherwise fluent and charming conversation, and it didn't immediately occur to me that he wasn't just speaking and listening but also clocking everyone around us, adjusting his voice, in real time, to strangers' various levels of voyeurism. It was like being with an intelligence agent.

“So much of it is luck,” Hedges said. “And I feel like there is some force watching over me that's making it really fucking easy for me. And I don't mean like it's so easy for me to do great work, but for whatever reason my path has not so far looked like the path of someone who has been working for 40 years and not gotten a job. It just hasn't. And I guess because it hasn't looked like that, I'm really wary and cautious of accepting praise in any way because there's actually just no way I can be truly great at this until I've put in 20 more years, there's just no fucking way. And I think a lot of the actors who get success at a really young age, they're just not as good. How could they be?”

We had reached the top of the spiral by this point. Hedges peered over a rail and onto the terrazzo lobby six coils down. “Are you afraid of heights?” he asked. “I'm terrified of them.”

Alice Gregory is a GQ correspondent.

A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2019 issue with the title "The Long Adolescence of Lucas Hedges."

Watch:

Inside Lucas Hedges’s Surreal Cover Shoot with Ryan McGinleySee the video.

The Tech Whiz Behind Vine and HQ Trivia Made Millions in His 20s. He Was Dead by 34

Colin Kroll, a college dropout turned startup millionaire, drifted through his company’s holiday party at Gran Morsi, a cozy Italian restaurant in downtown Manhattan. Dressed in a gray sweater and jeans, he chatted up employees and their plus ones.

When one of his engineers offered to get Mr. Kroll a drink, he flashed a big smile. “I’ve stopped drinking. I’m trying to be healthier.” He’d started running regularly, too.

“Look at you, being such a great CEO,” she said. Co-workers at the party chuckled to themselves about his earnestness as he circulated among the crowd asking, “Are you having a good time?”

© Paul Ryding

Mr. Kroll had co-founded two highflying startups—Vine, the six-second video-sharing platform bought by Twitter Inc. in 2012, and, most recently, Intermedia Labs, the company behind the popular game-show app HQ Trivia.

His performance at the HQ Trivia party was a foil for his often awkward personality. To friends, Mr. Kroll was a gentle, endearingly weird soul who identified with misfits and looked out for others. A Muslim classmate who was bullied in middle school remembers he was the only one who would hold her hand during games of Red Rover. Friends joked about how he bought Kraft Macaroni & Cheese in bulk, even after his success.

He also struggled with managerial duties. Colleagues said at times he made off-color remarks. If Mr. Kroll thought an idea was dumb, he said so. He sometimes reamed out subordinates. Old struggles with drugs and alcohol haunted him, friends said.

Twenty-four hours after the party, he was found dead in his apartment. He was 34 years old.

Silicon Valley has changed the traditional path of business success. Instead of toiling up the corporate ladder, young coding whizzes can take a fast track to wealth and fame. Like their wunderkind counterparts in sports and entertainment, they’re not always ready.

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This account of Mr. Kroll’s rise and untimely death is based on interviews with and documents from more than three dozen friends, family members, lovers, current and former colleagues, investors and police.

Rus Yusupov, a central figure in Mr. Kroll’s adult life who co-founded Intermedia Labs with him, discussed many aspects of their relationship in an interview, but declined to comment on some details. Colleagues said they fought bitterly at times. Mr. Yusupov said, “It’s sad and upsetting that anyone would continue to try to divide Colin and me and misrepresent our strong partnership, especially after his unfortunate passing.”

***

Family members saw Mr. Kroll’s intellect and doggedness at a young age. He grew up in the suburbs of Detroit; his parents divorced when he was 10.

In middle school he made a business bootlegging Japanese anime he had downloaded from Napster. He taught himself to code in multiple programming languages while jamming to Dave Matthews Band in his bedroom.

During his high-school years, Mr. Kroll became frustrated that his home’s slow internet connection was impeding his ability to download music, his father, Alan Kroll, said. So he wrote a program to boot his neighbors off the web, leaving him with more bandwidth. That prompted a visit from the cable company. The young Mr. Kroll feigned innocence.

“We didn’t know if Colin was going to grow up and be a famous app designer or if he was going after the Federal Reserve Bank’s computer,” the elder Mr. Kroll said. “We, at that point, understood he had skills probably to do either one.”

Mr. Kroll enrolled in community college, dropped out, then did coding jobs for local businesses. He frequently got high on marijuana and prescription drugs with his best friend from childhood, Jeff Dickinson. “He was struggling with addiction from an early age,” Mr. Dickinson said.

Similar troubles ran in Mr. Kroll’s family. His grandfather and father struggled for years with drinking, family members said. His uncle, Gene Kroll, once dove into a shallow lake while drunk, leaving him partially paralyzed. He eventually joined Alcoholics Anonymous and became a therapist, he confirmed.

Mr. Dickinson knew Mr. Kroll was never destined for a normal life. “He was determined to outdo himself,” he said.

It didn’t take long for the young men to realize they were squandering time. Mr. Dickinson took steps to get clean and, at 19, Mr. Kroll joined his Uncle Gene at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Mr. Kroll began studying computer engineering at Oakland University in southeast Michigan, paying his way with freelance coding assignments for $50 an hour. An online advertising firm called Right Media soon offered him a job in New York. Mr. Kroll’s mentor at school told him, “You can teach me more than I can teach you,” his father recalled.

Mr. Kroll packed a rental van and drove to a 400-square-foot apartment in Manhattan. It was 2007.

That same year, the elder Mr. Kroll, who owns a furnishings business, resisted arrest after driving while drunk. He decided to sober up for good.

“I was never really a great role model,” his father said. “I drank too much. I smoked too much weed.… Sometimes you have blinders on when you’re doing it yourself and you don’t see your kids as clearly as when you’re straight.”

***

At 23, Mr. Kroll was determined to outshine the Ivy League talent he was meeting. He stayed sober and was active in AA. His fiancée had moved with him to New York—a Christian woman he met at AA—but their engagement broke apart after she committed to the ministry.

At Right Media, he worked 12-hour days, went home and worked some more, said Edward Kozek, who was VP of engineering and Mr. Kroll’s mentor.

He moved to a new company and was job-hunting again when he met Drew Patterson, the founder of Jetsetter, a travel e-commerce startup. Mr. Patterson was delighted by Mr. Kroll’s rough edges and direct style. In the job interview, Mr. Kroll fired off questions like: “How are you going to build a business that’s going to change the world?”

“It was immediately apparent he had a spark,” Mr. Patterson said. Mr. Kroll became chief technology officer, chain-smoked close to two packs a day of Marlboro Reds and worked incessantly.

He confided to his mentor Mr. Kozek that the Jetsetter staff didn’t like him. “Everyone thinks I’m an asshole, and I am an asshole, but I can’t help it because everyone around me is so stupid,” he said.

“He was right,” Mr. Kozek said. “Compared to him, they were stupid, but he just didn’t know how to manage people.”

At Jetsetter, Mr. Kroll met the two men, also in their 20s, who would lead him to his biggest windfall: Rus Yusupov, a graphic designer, and Dom Hofmann, an engineer.

Mr. Hofmann disliked Mr. Kroll’s abrasive ways so much he eventually quit. He began working on a video app called Vine with Mr. Yusupov—and despite their clashes decided to bring on Mr. Kroll as founding chief technology officer because of his technical skill. Messrs. Hofmann and Kroll made amends and became close friends.

Vine’s technology gave users a platform to make looping, six-second videos on their phones. It was so intriguing in beta testing that Twitter offered more than $30 million, mostly in stock, to acquire the company in October 2012, before the app officially launched.

Mr. Kroll owned only a small portion of the company’s shares, but made more than $5 million thanks to cash bonuses and restricted stock, a person familiar with the deal terms said.

All three men were offered jobs at Twitter with the promise of annual bonuses of $1 million for the first few years. Mr. Kroll proposed to his then-girlfriend, Maggie Neuwald.

He also began to party a lot more, friends said. He was fond of Scotch, followed by shots, interspersed with beers, and would throw back three drinks for every one his friends would order, a close friend said. He smoked pot and occasionally did cocaine.

“He had been very careful for a very long time,” Ms. Neuwald said. “I think at some point he kind of wanted to let loose a little.”

Their engagement fell apart when she and Mr. Kroll realized they wanted different things, she said. For one, she wanted children. Mr. Kroll told her he didn’t know if he would ever be ready for kids.

He began to travel widely, and bought a white Porsche. He drifted apart from his mentor, Mr. Kozek, who is now a senior vice president at NBCUniversal.

“He was living the high life,” Mr. Kozek said. “All he could talk about was how much money he made and all the hot girls who were after him.”

Vine, launched in January 2013, was a hit, and the three founders started hanging out with the internet celebrities it created. Mr. Kroll dated a prominent Viner, Jessica Harmon.

He enjoyed sharing his new wealth with family. One Mother’s Day he had 100 roses delivered to his mom, a food sales representative. He gave his grandmother more than $15,000. He treated his father to a trip to London.

Mr. Hofmann left Twitter in late 2013 and Mr. Kroll was elevated to general manager of Vine. Competition from Facebook-owned Instagram was heating up, and Mr. Kroll complained to his father about what he considered laziness among his New York staff.

Twitter launched an internal investigation into Mr. Kroll’s behavior after a star female Vine engineer quit, according to a former senior Twitter executive. Twitter declined to comment.

One Monday morning at the office, Mr. Kroll told her explicit details about his weekend with another woman, said people familiar with the matter. Later, when she started reporting directly to him, he told her, “This means we can never date now.” She quit but never filed a formal complaint.

The Twitter inquiry turned up a handful of grievances from men and women about Mr. Kroll’s habit of lashing out at employees and his moodiness, the former executive said. Results of the investigation concluded he created a hostile work environment but hadn’t sexually harassed anyone.

The executive called Mr. Kroll blunt and insensitive. He added that Mr. Kroll overflowed with ideas.

In April 2014, Twitter fired Mr. Kroll. He negotiated an exit package to keep his bonuses. Twitter shut down Vine in 2016 after many top users, marketers and ad buyers defected to competitors like Facebook and Snapchat. It wouldn’t be the last time Mr. Kroll’s behavior at Twitter became an issue.

***

An early Snapchat investor, Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, heard praise about Mr. Kroll’s engineering prowess and called on him. Mr. Liew was looking to recruit a partner at his firm, but Mr. Kroll said he had another startup idea in him. He eventually laid out a vision of creating a new kind of mobile live-video platform—one that would lead to an explosion in genres and formats.

“He could have wanted to open a bagel shop, and we would have funded him,” Mr. Liew said at Mr. Kroll’s memorial service in December.

With Lightspeed on board, Mr. Kroll used the seed funding to create Intermedia Labs with Mr. Yusupov, who had also left Twitter and was batting around the idea of a live game-show app hosted by astronauts.

Their first app, Hype, was in some respects an attempt to create a better Vine. After initial buzz, it plateaued.

Mr. Kroll brooded and experimented with some side projects. He played around with code on the “dark web,” a shadowy part of the internet known for criminal activity and drug trafficking, Mr. Kozek said. At one point, Mr. Kroll told Mr. Kozek he’d checked into a hospital for a week, saying he had worn himself thin.

By the spring of 2017, Messrs. Kroll and Yusupov settled on creating a game-show app to demonstrate the technical capabilities they had built. They invited a New York comedian, Scott Rogowsky, to audition as the host.

“A game show on an app? I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about,” said Mr. Rogowsky, who showed up to his audition wearing a moth-eaten striped sweater.

HQ Trivia came out in late summer 2017. The show took off thanks, in part, to its live nature and routine schedule, like network television of old. Users would open the app at a set time—first once a day, at 9 p.m., with a 3 p.m. show added later—and compete for prize money.

The 15-minute lightning rounds of multiple-choice questions covered topics from paleontology to SpongeBob SquarePants. Hundreds of thousands of fans logged in for shows, creating glitches that Mr. Kroll’s team worked feverishly to resolve.

Mr. Yusupov wanted Mr. Rogowsky, who started out hosting the show in vintage T-shirts, to buy a suit. Mr. Kroll thought suits, fancy cameras and a production studio were a waste.

By the end of 2017, the company needed more money. One hurdle that tripped up potential investors as they did their due diligence was Mr. Kroll’s Twitter history. The burgeoning #MeToo movement made investors wary of any hint of misconduct.

Silicon Valley venture firm Greylock Partners passed on the deal in part over concern about Mr. Kroll’s tenure at Twitter. Other firms passed as well.

When Mr. Liew, the Lightspeed investor who sat on the board, heard about the misgivings, he conducted his own investigation, tracking down the woman who left Mr. Kroll’s team at Twitter. She told him that while Mr. Kroll’s behavior was inappropriate, she didn’t think he deserved more punishment.

“It read to me like an awkward misreading of social interactions [by Mr. Kroll] that, frankly, I am used to with technical founders,” Mr. Liew said. He felt Mr. Kroll had matured.

On Dec. 18, the tech news site Recode wrote a piece about the company’s fundraising struggles. It described Mr. Kroll as difficult to work for and “creepy” with women at Twitter. Other outlets, including Fortune and New York magazine, followed.

Lisa Luo, who joined Mr. Kroll’s team the day the Recode article published, said Mr. Kroll apologized to colleagues for his past. He told Ms. Luo that “sometimes I guess I’m a bigger flirt than I realize.” In the ensuing weeks, he swung by to tell her he appreciated her work. When she worked without taking a break, he rolled over in an office chair to say, “Just making sure you still have a pulse.”

“He was the one person at the company that made me feel so comfortable,” she said.

After the articles came out, Mr. Kroll was deflated and Mr. Yusupov blindsided. Mr. Kroll stopped coming to venture-capital pitches, leaving Mr. Yusupov as the face of the company. Mr. Kroll offered to resign, but Mr. Liew wouldn’t hear of it.

Intermedia Labs was rescued by Cyan Banister, a venture partner at Founders Fund, created by tech billionaire Peter Thiel. The fund prioritizes keeping founders in charge of the companies they started.

Ms. Banister investigated his behavior, talking to people at Twitter and others who knew him. Her conclusion: Mr. Kroll’s offenses were in the past. She led the company’s Series A-1 round of $15 million at a $100 million valuation in February 2018.

“I’m not saying that nothing happened. There is a spectrum of things and he was very, very, low, low, low on that spectrum,” she said. “The more I got to know him the more delightful he became.”

Still, the reputational damage had taken a toll. Facebook showed informal interest in acquiring the company, but talks cooled after the Recode article, according to people close to the company. Facebook didn’t respond to requests for comment. Until that point, the two founders had essentially served as co-CEOs. Now Mr. Yusupov took the title of CEO.

Mr. Kroll told friends and family he suspected Mr. Yusupov of leaking damaging information to edge him out. Mr. Yusupov declined to comment on the allegation. Mr. Liew brought in an executive coach to help the men rebuild trust. Mr. Kroll apologized to Mr. Yusupov for causing issues and said he wanted to move past them.

Vindicated by the funding and hoping the Twitter story would fade away, Mr. Kroll texted a friend that he was “soooo charged now. Let someone make the case I shouldn’t invent things. The only person in my way is me.”

***

Mr. Kroll was intent on resetting his life. He wanted to make his company the size of Facebook, with a campus in Detroit that would hire people with nontraditional backgrounds like his own. He quit smoking and started cooking and baking oatmeal cookies.

HQ Trivia users were losing interest. The app’s audience peaked at 2.4 million concurrent streamers during a $250,000 jackpot game last March and then began falling.

Mr. Yusupov raised the jackpots to attract more players. Messrs. Kroll and Rogowsky, fearful of bleeding money, proposed giving smaller prizes, including noncash rewards, to more people to spread the sense of winning. The number of viewers kept falling.

By May, the founders’ relationship had deteriorated dramatically, colleagues said.

Mr. Kroll left New York for a few days “for my own sanity,” he told a colleague on Slack. “I’m not in a great place.” He texted a friend that he wanted to quit.

That month, HQ’s star host complained to Mr. Liew and Ms. Banister—the other two board members besides Mr. Kroll and Mr. Yusupov—that Mr. Yusupov’s decisions were leading the company to ruin.

Mr. Yusupov began calling Mr. Kroll a criminal and a drug addict in conversations, current and former colleagues said. Mr. Yusupov denied the allegation in an interview. Mr. Kroll would tell people close to him that his partner lacked business acumen. Mr. Kroll asked the executive coach for a reference to a psychiatrist, said people familiar with the matter.

Their squabbles put the company in a creative paralysis, colleagues said. Mr. Kroll pushed the need to roll out new interactive shows for the app, they said, while Mr. Yusupov prioritized building up HQ Trivia and courting publicity.

“The biggest problem that I saw under Rus’s tenure was his inability to let the leads of the company do their job,” Mr. Rogowsky said. “We were just stuck in this inertia.”

“I’ve always welcomed and appreciated candid feedback. I’m evolving as a leader and will continue to do so,” Mr. Yusupov said.

Employee complaints about Mr. Yusupov’s micromanagement filtered up to the board. Many employees were considering leaving, and some senior managers questioned Mr. Yusupov’s truthfulness, according to people familiar with a report the executive coach shared with board members after canvassing the office. Some employees criticized Mr. Kroll as recalcitrant.

Mr. Liew wanted to push out Mr. Yusupov and find a new CEO, and Mr. Kroll was a top candidate. Colleagues said Mr. Kroll expressed loyalty to Mr. Yusupov in conversations. Ms. Banister resigned from the board rather than choose between the co-founders.

At one point, Mr. Yusupov asked Mr. Rogowsky if he’d like to be CEO—complete with cameras, turning the job into a reality show for the app. Mr. Rogowsky told him that was ridiculous.

Mr. Yusupov told Mr. Rogowsky that if Mr. Kroll became CEO, he would “piss off a lot of people and they will leave.”

***

In August, a female employee who worked for Mr. Yusupov lodged a complaint with human resources regarding Mr. Kroll’s behavior. Given his prior management history, the complaint set off alarms.

The woman said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that Mr. Yusupov had called her into his office and asked, “What do you dislike about working here?” She told him Mr. Kroll was obstructionist, could take things too personally and had, at times, acted erratically. Mr. Yusupov strongly encouraged her to write a complaint, she said.

She said she was uncomfortable doing so, but she emailed human resources to outline her concerns. She also called Mr. Liew and Ms. Banister. Her complaints included Mr. Kroll ranting on Slack about work in a way she insinuated could be drug- or alcohol-fueled, though she told Mr. Liew that she hadn’t seen him partying.

She said Mr. Kroll seemed irrationally upset when he found out some HQ users were cheating, sparring with one alleged cheater so much the man came into the office demanding money. After the incident, the company hired armed security. She also said Mr. Kroll talked about rival entrepreneurs and their apps in threatening terms, saying he wanted to “kill” the competition.

Mr. Yusupov said in an interview that “when an employee made multiple complaints and expressed that they were scared, they were encouraged to follow company HR policies to report their experience.”

Mr. Kroll told people close to him he believed Mr. Yusupov compelled the woman to file the complaint to hurt Mr. Kroll’s chances of taking over the company. Messrs. Yusupov and Liew—by that time the only board members besides Mr. Kroll—retained an outside investigator to look into the allegations. The investigation found nothing that warranted denying Mr. Kroll the CEO job.

Mr. Liew and Ms. Banister said they were aware that Mr. Kroll had used cocaine recreationally—he had openly told them at different times. But he had promised Mr. Liew early in 2018 that he wouldn’t use it again, Mr. Liew said. The two venture partners had discussed Mr. Kroll’s cocaine use at one point and decided that it wasn’t affecting his work. At the time of the CEO transition, Mr. Liew said he was only aware of Mr. Kroll’s marijuana use.

The three men hashed out a deal where Mr. Yusupov would stay on as chief creative officer and Mr. Kroll would become CEO—although Mr. Kroll confessed to some investors and friends he wasn’t sure he was cut out for the job.

Recode soon called again. Someone had leaked the woman’s complaint, and Recode published a story on Nov. 4. Mr. Kroll accused Mr. Yusupov of sabotage and considered firing him. Mr. Yusupov denied to Mr. Kroll that he leaked anything.

After finding out about the behind-the-scenes CEO battle and the leak, the woman quit, feeling she may have been used as a pawn by Mr. Yusupov. By that point, she said, she and Mr. Kroll “were on good terms, and he even offered to connect me to people in his network.” She added that she hadn’t been scared when she expressed her concerns, but she was worried about the business.

The rest of the fall, Messrs. Yusupov and Kroll remained distant, employees said, but seemed to be making the new power dynamic work. Mr. Yusupov brought in new brand partners. Mr. Kroll made a product road map that allowed engineers to work more quickly on improving the app’s user experience.

Meanwhile, Mr. Kroll was house-hunting in Miami and Manhattan’s West Village. He told several former girlfriends he wished things had ended differently, telling one ex that he wanted to have children while he was young enough to take them scuba-diving. He brainstormed baby names: Strategy, Cadence and Pepper.

He texted his ex-girlfriend Ms. Harmon that he was prepared to buy three houses but was waiting to meet the right woman. Though his financial advisers had scolded him for a recent $75,000 credit card bill, he wrote, “I’m never worried about making more money TBH. I’m worried about everything else.”

***

At the holiday party on Dec. 14, Mr. Kroll made an early exit.

As he headed back to his apartment, he texted Julie Antonio, a woman few friends or family members knew about, to tell her he had heroin at his place, Ms. Antonio said. While several in Mr. Kroll’s close circle knew about his occasional cocaine use, none had ever heard him talk about heroin.

It was also not well known how close Mr. Kroll had become to Ms. Antonio, 27, now an Uber driver. The two met five years earlier through Vine connections and developed a sporadic romantic relationship.

Ms. Antonio said Mr. Kroll joked he was “a smarter Michael Scott”—the awkward boss from the television show “The Office”—and discussed work pressures. “He was a human being trying to do superhuman things,” she said.

His mention of heroin that night worried her. “I was like, ‘I’m coming over because this is weird. This is not you,’ ” she said. Ms. Antonio, who was arrested and charged with possession of heroin in 2015, said she stopped using the drug after that incident.

After she arrived at his apartment, the two snorted coke. Mr. Kroll, wearing an HQ Trivia T-shirt, also snorted heroin as they talked on his couch, she said.

Before they went to sleep, “he seemed completely lucid.” Lying together, Mr. Kroll spoke longingly of moving home and starting a family.

The two drifted off. Early Saturday afternoon, Mr. Kroll was asleep on his side, “snoring in my ear,” Ms. Antonio said. She kissed him goodbye and left, but almost immediately started sending a series of text messages.

At 1:47 p.m.: “sorry to sneak out. I didn’t wanna wake you, text me when you wake up.”

At 5:42 p.m.: “Are you still sleeping? Can you please let me know you’re okay, I’m getting worried.”

At 9 p.m.: “I don’t want to invade your space but I’m pretty close to coming to check on you. If you don’t wanna talk to me, it’s fine. Please just let me know you’re good.”

At 10:30 p.m.: “So I’m coming to check on you.”

Ms. Antonio’s knocks on the door only elicited barking from Mr. Kroll’s Shar-Pei-Pug mix Tater Tot. She called 911. Firefighters entered through an elevator that went directly into his apartment. Ms. Antonio said she jumped on the bed where Mr. Kroll was still lying on his side. He was cold and lifeless, with a trickle of blood coming out of his nose. Heroin and cocaine were nearby.

In early February, the New York City medical examiner’s office found Mr. Kroll’s cause of death was an accidental overdose by fentanyl-laced heroin, a phenomenon that has driven a recent increase in fatal overdoses citywide.

The weekend of Mr. Kroll’s death, the board held an emergency meeting and made Mr. Yusupov interim CEO.

Mr. Kroll didn’t have a will, so his assets, including a nearly 28% stake of outstanding shares in the company, are going to his immediate family.

Two days before Christmas, Mr. Yusupov launched HQ Words, a “Wheel of Fortune”-style puzzle game Mr. Kroll had pushed to develop. In-app purchases have increased revenue, which has totaled about $15 million since the company’s inception. Together, in recent weeks, the games have been gaining viewers.

Write to Shalini Ramachandran at shalini.ramachandran@wsj.com, Zolan Kanno-Youngs at Zolan.Kanno-Youngs@wsj.com and Yoree Koh at yoree.koh@wsj.com