Christopher Mintz-Plasse Made Peace With McLovin and Picked Up a Bass

Christopher Mintz-Plasse

Photo: Thibault / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 20, 1989 Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation	Actor and musician
Known for	How to Train Your Dragon, How to Train Your Dragon 2, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

One of the fan conventions on his calendar this year did not bother to print his name on the poster. It promised the chance to meet McLovin. Christopher Mintz-Plasse has spent most of his adult life answering to a word that appears on a fake ID in Superbad, a teen comedy in which he was the third wheel, and that word has outlasted a supervillain, a dragon-riding Viking, a troll king and two network sitcoms. The more interesting question is not how he escaped it. It is why, at some point, he stopped trying. In a London interview he put it with a swear word in the middle: McLovin is what he will be remembered for, and without McLovin he would not have the car.

He grew up in Woodland Hills, on the western edge of Los Angeles, where he was born on June 20, 1989, the son of Ellen Mintz, a school counselor, and Ray Plasse, a postal worker from central Massachusetts. That father explains a lifelong devotion to Boston sports teams in a city that mostly ignores them. His mother is Jewish; his father’s family is Catholic. At El Camino Real High School he joined the improv comedy team.

He had no headshots. For the Superbad audition he sent a photo taken with his phone, and he got Fogell, the friend whose fake ID carries a single name. He was 17 when the cameras rolled, young enough that the law required his mother on set for his sex scene. Greg Mottola directed from a script by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Judd Apatow produced, and the film, released in 2007 with Jonah Hill and Michael Cera in the leads and Emma Stone in her debut, became the comedy of that summer. Critics singled out the kid nobody had heard of, and MTV nominated him for best breakthrough performance. The ID took on a life of its own: a replica packaged with the special-edition DVD looked so much like a real Hawaii license that Walmart pulled the disc from its shelves in the state.

What followed were supporting parts that played variations on the same nerd. He was Augie, the live-action role-playing obsessive, in David Wain’s Role Models opposite Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott, and a comic Isaac in Harold Ramis’s Year One. Then came Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, which changed the shape of the career. Mintz-Plasse auditioned for the title role and was told his energy was too loud for a hero. The producers gave him Red Mist, the rich kid who wants to be a costumed vigilante, and the part grew once Vaughn saw what he did with it. In Kick-Ass 2 that rich kid became the main villain, and Mintz-Plasse, who called it the darkest thing he had played, hired an acting coach for the heavier scenes.

The same year Kick-Ass opened, he began a parallel career most of his audience never sees. He voiced Fishlegs, the boy who memorizes dragon statistics, in DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon, and stayed with him through two sequels and years of the Dragons television series. In Trolls he became King Gristle Jr., a role he repeated across the franchise. In between came Fright Night, the remake in which he played Anton Yelchin’s estranged best friend, a small part in Pitch Perfect and the fraternity comedy Neighbors.

The less flattering account of those years is about television, and about how little control a supporting actor has over what sticks. CBS cast him as the lead of the sitcom Friend Me; several episodes were shot, and the show was shelved before it aired after the death of its creator, Alan Kirschenbaum. His next network vehicle, The Great Indoors, put him opposite Joel McHale as a tech-obsessed millennial and lasted a single season. The industry kept reading him through the McLovin lens, and his sharpest later work came in small turns that played against it: Neil, the predatory nice guy in Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, a film that indicts the very type teen comedies once let off the hook, and the guidance counselor of Honor Society, whose reviews singled him out alongside Angourie Rice and Gaten Matarazzo. When DreamWorks remade How to Train Your Dragon in live action, Fishlegs went to Julian Dennison. The voice that had carried the character for nearly a decade was not part of its next life.

The other career is the one he talks about now. He spent eight years as the drummer of The Young Rapscallions until the band split in 2015, then moved to bass for his own group, Bear on Fire. In 2021 he joined Ben Kweller on the Circuit Boredom tour, and in 2025 he came back to play the songs of Cover the Mirrors, the album Kweller made after his 16-year-old son Dorian was killed in a car crash. Those shows were small and openly grieving. Mintz-Plasse plays a right-handed bass flipped upside down, and in April 2026 he stood through the whole set when Kweller opened for The Format at the Salt Shed in Chicago.

On screen, the work has become mostly voices. He played Pigeon Pete in Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, produced by his old Superbad writers, and voiced Dmitri Petrovich in Backyard Sports: The Animated Special, released in January 2026. In 2023 he took a seat on Fox’s celebrity reality show Stars on Mars. Last October he told the same London interviewer that he had a film with Paul Walter Hauser to shoot that November, a project that had not been announced.

On Christmas Eve 2022 he proposed to Britt Bowman, a concert photographer and his partner since 2017. His Instagram announcement read, in full, “Life’s over!!!” followed by three red hearts.

There is no confirmed release on his slate for the months ahead. What there is instead is a tour schedule, a convention calendar and a role he no longer resents. Superbad turns twenty next summer, and the actor who got into it with a phone photo seems happy to let McLovin take the questions while he stands a little to the side, holding down the low end.

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Tags: actors, Seth Rogen, jonah hill, Kick-Ass, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, How to Train Your Dragon, Superbad

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