Richard Ayoade

Richard Ayoade

Richard Ellef Ayoade is an English comedian, film director, screenwriter, television presenter, actor, and author. He is best known for his role as the socially awkward IT technician Maurice Moss in Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd. He has often worked alongside Noel Fielding, Julian Barratt, Matt Berry, Matthew Holness and Rich Fulcher.

About Richard Ayoade in brief

Summary Richard AyoadeRichard Ellef Ayoade is an English comedian, film director, screenwriter, television presenter, actor, and author. He is best known for his role as the socially awkward IT technician Maurice Moss in Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd. He has often worked alongside Noel Fielding, Julian Barratt, Matt Berry, Matthew Holness, and Rich Fulcher. He was president of Footlights at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He and Holness debuted their respective characters Dean Learner and Garth Marenghi at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2000, bringing the characters to television with Garth’s Darkplace and Man to Man with Dean Learners. He wrote and directed the comedy-drama film Submarine in 2010, an adaptation of the 2008 novel by Joe Dunthorne. He co-starred in the American science fiction comedy film The Watch in 2012 and his second film, the black comedy The Double, premiered in 2013, drawing inspiration from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella of the same title. He presented the factual shows Gadget Man, its spin-off Travel Man and the 2017 revival of The Crystal Maze. He provided his voice to a number of animated projects, including the films The Boxtrolls, Early Man, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part and Soul and the television shows Strange Hill High and Apple & Onion. He won the Perrier Comedy Award in 2001 for co-writing and performing in Garth M Karenghi’s Netherhead, the sequel to Fright Knight, the spoof comedy series Garth’s Darkplace, and ADBC: Rock of the Opera, which was never broadcast on television.

He also appeared in a 1980s television drama, which saw him play Reed Learner, a hospital administrator, in a par-of-the-life parody of A Rock and a Hard Place. He appeared on The Big Fat Quiz of the Year in 2013 and served as a team captain on Was It Something I Said? in 2013. He has written three comedic books centring on film: Ayoad on A Cinematic Odyssey, The Grip of Film, and A yoade on Top. He is the son of a Norwegian mother and a Nigerian father, and was born in Hammersmith, London, on 23 May 1977. His father was an electrical engineer, and his mother was from Ipswich, Suffolk. At 15 he developed an interest in film beyond Star Wars and Back to the Future and began exploring the works of directors Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman, and Federico Fellini. He studied at St Joseph’s College,. where he recalls being obsessed with J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. He later went on to read law at Cambridge University, where he won the Martin Steele Prize for play production. He says that his parents would not approve of studies considered to be of the \”Regency era\”, adding that non-vocational degree seemed such an outlandish indulgence.