Simon Bird


Simon Antony Bird is an English actor, director and comedian. He is best known for playing Will McKenzie in the E4 comedy series The Inbetweeners, and its two films, and Adam Goodman in the Channel 4 comedy series Friday Night Dinner.

Early life

Bird was born in Guildford, Surrey, as the third of four children of Claremont McKenna College Professor Graham Bird and Professor Heather Bird.
Bird was educated at Cranmore School, West Horsley, the Royal Grammar School, Guildford, and Queens' College, Cambridge, where he read English, alongside Inbetweeners co-star Joe Thomas. At Cambridge, Bird was the president of the Footlights, the university's sketch and theatrical group. He graduated with a double First.

Career

Early comedy career

While completing a Master of Arts degree in cultural and critical studies at Birkbeck College, Bird set up the sketch comedy group "The House of Windsor" with former Footlights contemporaries Joe Thomas and Jonny Sweet. They performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2007 and in 2008 with a show called The Meeting, described as a site-specific comedy installation set in an actual boardroom. Bird and Thomas were also regulars on series 1 and 2 of The Weekly Show, a podcast for Channel 4 Radio.
Bird also performs stand-up comedy and took part in Chortle's national student comedy awards in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, coming second in his final attempt.

Breakthrough

In 2008, Bird was cast in E4's teen comedy The Inbetweeners as Will McKenzie, along with Joe Thomas. He won the 2008 British Comedy Award for Best Male Newcomer and the 2009 British Comedy Award for Best Actor. He was also nominated for Best Comedy Performance at the 2008 Royal Television Society Awards, and Best Male Performance in a Comedy Programme at the 2009 BAFTA Awards.

Subsequent work

In 2010, Bird created a BBC Three comedy panel show The King Is Dead, in which a well-known person is hypothetically killed off and a panel of three personalities go head-to-head in a series of satirical quiz rounds and challenges in their bid to replace them. He hosted alongside Nick Mohammed and Katy Wix.
Another of Bird's projects is Friday Night Dinner, a single-camera comedy written by Robert Popper and made by Big Talk Productions.
Bird returned to the character of Will McKenzie in The Inbetweeners Movie which was released on 17 August 2011. In 2014 he portrayed Will McKenzie in the second movie about the Inbetweeners, The Inbetweeners 2.
Bird has co-created, co-written, and co-starred in a pilot, "Chickens", for Channel 4, about three men who remain in England during World War I. It was broadcast as part of Channel 4's Comedy Showcase season. In 2012, Sky One picked up a six episode season; filming began in late 2012 and the series premiered in summer 2013.
As of 2017, he was starring on the West End in The Philanthropist, alongside Charlotte Ritchie.
In 2017, it was reported that Bird would direct his first feature film, Days of Bagnold Summer, which has been backed by Creative England and the British Film Institute

Personal life

In 2012, Bird married Lisa Owens; they met at Cambridge University when they took part in a sketch about a couple rowing. Bird proposed to Owens in Paris and they married a year later. Their first child, a son, was born in 2016.

Filmography

Film

Television