Ricky Gervais

Ricky Dene Gervais was born on 25 June 1961 in Reading, Berkshire, the youngest of four children to a French-Canadian labourer father and an English mother. He grew up on the Whitley council estate, attended Ashmead Comprehensive and read philosophy at University College London, where he graduated with a 2:1. Before comedy he tried pop stardom, fronting the New Wave duo Seona Dancing in the early 1980s, and later managed the then-unknown band Suede while working as head of speech at the London radio station Xfm — where he first hired a young researcher named Stephen Merchant.

Gervais was almost forty when he broke through. A recurring turn as the loathsome boss 'Seedy Boss' on Channel 4's The 11 O'Clock Show in 1998, followed by his own Meaning of Life talk-show pilot, led directly to The Office, co-written and co-directed with Merchant. The BBC Two mockumentary ran for just twelve episodes and two specials between 2001 and 2003, yet reset the grammar of the British sitcom: no laugh track, no jokes as such, only the excruciating silence of David Brent trying to be liked. It won the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy Series in both 2004 and 2005 — the first British series ever to do so — and spawned successful remakes in the US, France, Germany, Canada, Israel, Sweden, Chile and India.

Extras followed in 2005, then the podcast trilogy with Merchant and Karl Pilkington that entered the Guinness Book of Records as the most downloaded in the world. From 2010 Gervais reinvented himself as a live stand-up, filling arenas with tours (Fame, Science, Humanity, Armageddon) and later a run of Netflix specials that made him one of the platform's flagship stand-ups. His hosting of the Golden Globes across five ceremonies between 2010 and 2020 became notorious for opening monologues that skewered the Hollywood establishment to its face.

Alongside stand-up he has continued to write and direct: the film The Invention of Lying (2009), the Netflix series Derek (2012–2014) and, most successfully, After Life (2019–2022), a bereavement comedy-drama that became Netflix's most-watched British original. A long-standing and outspoken animal-rights campaigner, Gervais lives in Hampstead with his partner of over four decades, the author Jane Fallon, and continues to tour, write and provoke in roughly equal measure.